existentialism

My eyes did not leave the Captain, who, with his hand stretched out to sea, was watching with a glowing eye the glorious wreck. Perhaps I was never to know who he was, from whence he came, or where he was going to, but I saw the man move, and apart from the _s...

Then I thought of the Great Fear that was between the two species, and for the first time, with a sudden shiver, came the clear knowledge of what the meat I had seen might be. I looked at little Weena sleeping beside me, her face white and starlike under the s...

I once had a friend, the most noble of human creatures, and am entitled, therefore, to judge respecting friendship. You have hope, and the world before you, and have no cause for despair. But I—I have lost everything and cannot begin life anew.” As he said thi...

stars and clouds and winds, ye are all about to mock me; if ye really pity me, crush sensation and memory; let me become as nought; but if not, depart, depart, and leave me in darkness.” These were wild and miserable thoughts, but I cannot describe to you how ...

After all, as Conseil said, we enjoyed perfect liberty, we were delicately and abundantly fed. We could not complain, and, indeed, the singularity of our fate reserved such wonderful compensation for us, that we had no right to accuse it as yet.

Now look at this clock; it is electrical, and goes with a regularity that defies the best chronometers. I have divided it into twenty-four hours, like the Italian clocks, because for me there is neither night nor day, sun nor moon, but only that factitious lig...

I keep you, when I could, by a word, plunge you into the depths of the ocean. You came to surprise a secret which no man in the world must penetrate,—the secret of my whole existence. And you think that I am going to send you back to that world which must know...

Besides, to work was to quit the _Nautilus_, and breathe directly the pure air drawn from the reservoirs, and supplied by our apparatus, and to quit the impoverished and vitiated atmosphere. Towards evening the trench was dug one yard deeper. When I returned o...

“That’s what I’ve been thinking,” he said; “that’s what I’ve been thinking. Most of the people were hard at it squealing and exciting themselves. I’ve been in sight of death once or twice; I’m not an ornamental soldier, and at the best and worst, death—it’s ju...

On each side a window opened into this unexplored abyss. The obscurity of the saloon showed to advantage the brightness outside, and we looked out as if this pure crystal had been the glass of an immense aquarium. “You wished to see, friend Ned; well, you see ...

I have tried to keep an open mind; and it is not the ordinary things of life that could close it, but the strange things, the extraordinary things, the things that make one doubt if they be mad or sane.” “Thank you, thank you, a thousand times! If you will let...

My internal being was in a state of insurrection and turmoil; I felt that order would thence arise, but I had no power to produce it.

The brain is at work without its required food, and the most fantastic notions fill the mind. Hitherto I had never known what hunger really meant. And yet, three months before I could tell my terrible story of starvation, as I thought it.

Still it was a positive fact that someone was speaking. A dread fell upon my soul that it might be my own words brought back to me by a distant echo. Perhaps without knowing it, I might have been crying aloud. I resolutely closed my lips, and once more placed ...

At this moment nothing is clear to me; I catch but a glimpse of light amidst all the darkness, and I must confine myself to writing as events shall dictate. That day, the 24th of January, 1868, at noon, the second officer came to take the altitude of the sun.