Joseph Conrad Quote

So I'm sort of copying Pete by posting one of my favorite passages.

"The artist appeals to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty and pain...and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the lonliness of innumberable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity--the dead to the living and the living to the unborn."

-Conrad

Interesting sidenote--Joseph Conrad was Polish, and although he was perfectly fluent in English when writing, he had a hard time speaking it--His accent was so bad that most native English speakers couldn't understand a word he said. I learned that in my phonetics class--she used him as an example of how some people have a "knack" for assimilating language in the spoken form, while others (like Conrad) are unable when speaking to shed the phological rules that govern their own language. Here I am a former British Literature teacher and I never knew that.