Kurtz Quotes

“But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself and, by heavens I tell you, it had gone mad.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“The horror! The horror!”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn't touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror--of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision--he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath:
The horror! The horror!”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“It was as though an animated image of death carved out of old ivory had been shaking its hand with menaces at a motionless crowd of men made of dark and glittering bronze.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“he main point is that Conrad realistically described the terrible things done by Belgians in the Congo. Hochschild certainly wishes this was Conrad’s purpose. He repeats an old theory that Kurtz was based on the EIC officer Léon Rom whom Conrad “may have met” in 1890 and “almost certainly” read about in 1898. Visitors noted that Rom’s garden was decorated with polished skulls buried in the ground, the garden gnomes of the Congo then. But Kurtz’s compound has no skulls buried in the ground but rather freshly severed “heads on the stakes” that “seemed to sleep at the top of that pole.” As the British scholar Johan Adam Warodell notes, none of the “exclusively European prototypes” for Kurtz advanced by woke professors and historians followed this native mode of landscape gardening. By contrast, dozens of accounts of African warlords and slavers in the Congo published before 1898 described rotting heads on poles (“a wide-reaching area marked by a grass fence, tied to high poles, which at the very top were decorated with grinning, decomposing skulls,” as one 1888 account had it). Far from being “one of the most scathing indictments of [European] imperialism in all literature,” as Hochschild declares it, Heart of Darkness is one of the most scathing indictments of the absence of European imperialism in all literature. Kurtz is a symbol of the pre-colonial horrors of the Congo, horrors that the EIC, however fitfully, was bringing to an end.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“You and the minnow have the same face, Elk.”
― Jill Williamson, To Darkness Fled

“Kurtz pulled open the door and spoke to the floor. “Your business is your own, it is.” He swept out the door as fast as Sparrow had.”
― Jill Williamson, To Darkness Fled

“Reich’s genius birthed tools we’ve yet to fully grasp: his character armor and muscular armoring concepts seeded ego psychology, body psychotherapy, Gestalt therapy (Fritz Perls), bioenergetic analysis (Alexander Lowen), primal therapy (Arthur Janov), and the Radix of Charles R. Kelley. Beyond these, his mind-body vision ripples through newer somatic therapies of the late 20th and early 21st centuries: Somatic Experiencing (Peter A. Levine), healing trauma via bodily sensations; Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (Pat Ogden), merging somatic and cognitive trauma work; Core Energetics (John Pierrakos), blending bioenergetics with spirit; Hakomi Therapy (Ron Kurtz), mindful body-centered discovery; Bodynamic Analysis (Lisbeth Marcher), trauma through body-mind interplay; and Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE®, David Berceli), freeing tension with neurogenic tremors.”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion