“He looked at me patiently while I was thinking of something to say, but I could find nothing on the spur of the moment, and he began to walk on. I kept up, and anxious not to lose him, I said hurriedly that I couldn’t think of leaving him under a false impression of my—my—I stammered. The stupidity of the phrase appalled me while I was trying to finish it, but the power of the sentences has nothing to do with their sense or the logic of their construction. My idiotic mumble seemed to please him.”
— Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, 48.
