Patrick O Brian Quotes & Sayings

Should I feel better if I were to vomit?' asked Jagiello. 'I doubt it,' said Stephen. 'It has done nothing for the Colonel. — Patrick O'Brian

Why there you are, Stephen,' cried Jack. 'You are come home, I find.'
That is true,' said Stephen with an affectionate look: he prized statements of this kind in Jack. — Patrick O'Brian

She is remarkably dry,' he said to Stephen who, preferring to die in the open, had crept up on deck, — Patrick O'Brian

I know of few men over 50 that seem to me entirely human, virtually none who has long exercised authority. — Patrick O'Brian

It is unjust to provoke a man and then to complain he is a satyr if the provocation succeeds. You — Patrick O'Brian

He had been quite unprepared for this particular blow, striking under every conceivable kind of armour, and for some minutes he could hardly bear the pain, but sat there blinking in the sun. 'Christ,' he said at last. 'Another day. — Patrick O'Brian

They will not be pleased. But they know we must catch the monsoon with a well-found ship; and they know they are in the Navy
they have chosen their cake, and must lie on it.'
You mean, they cannot have their bed and eat it.'
No, no, it is not quite that either. I mean
I wish you would not confuse my mind, Stephen. — Patrick O'Brian

He reflected on his hitherto reflection that soldiers and sailors were, upon the whole, quite different creatures. 'And perhaps they are, too: yet perhaps drink, in very large quantities, may make the difference less evident. — Patrick O'Brian

After all a book can be represented as a conversation with one's demon. — Patrick O'Brian

The words 'Very finely played, sir, I believe' were formed in his gullet if not in his mouth when he caught the cold and indeed inimical look and heard the whisper, 'If you really must beat the measure, sir, let me entreat you to do so in time, and not half a beat ahead. — Patrick O'Brian

Wondering just how Mr Church thought he had deserved anything short of impalement, Stephen walked into the cabin. — Patrick O'Brian

A virtuous esculent! — Patrick O'Brian

These Danes have always been a very froward people. Do you know, Jack, what they did at Clonmacnois? They burnt it, the thieves, and their queen sat on the high altar mother-naked, uttering oracles in a heathen frenzy. Ota was the strumpet's name. It is all of a piece: look at Hamlet's mother. I only wonder her behaviour caused any comment. — Patrick O'Brian

For Captain Aubrey, as for the rest of brute creation, there were only two kinds of birds, the edible and the inedible. — Patrick O'Brian

You were always grossly obese,' observed Stephen. 'Were you to walk ten miles a day, and eat half what you do in fact devour, with no butcher's meat and no malt liquors, you would be able to play at the hand-ball like a Christian rather than a galvanized manatee, or dugong. Mr Goodridge, how do you so, sir? I hope I see you well.' This to Jack's opponent, a former shipmate, the master of HMS Polychrest and a fine navigator, but one whose calculations had unfortunately convinced him that phoenixes and comets were one and the same thing - that the appearance of a phoenix, reported in the chronicles, was in fact the return of one or another of the various comets whose periods were either known or conjectured. He resented disagreement, and although in ordinary matters he was the kindest, gentlest of men, he was now confined for maltreating a rear-admiral of the blue: he had not actually struck Sir James, but he had bitten his remonstrating finger. — Patrick O'Brian

Oh, there you are. I was afraid you had gone off to your stoats again. The carrier has brought you an ape.' 'What sort of an ape?' asked Stephen. 'A damned ill-conditioned sort of an ape. — Patrick O'Brian

McIntyre's tale may have predecessors, but it is unique. I strain for literary comparisons and think: Kipling, the classical Chinese poets, early Patrick O'Brian, Hopkins. I search for a definition of its animating presence: the predator, the Buddhist sage, the hunter. All fall short. I stand before The Snow Leopard's Tale in awe and with a little envy. It is a gem, an uncanny evocation of the cold ancient dusty highlands of Central Asia, and could only have come from Tom McIntyre. It is his best. — Stephen J. Bodio

(he was a great believer in the healing powers of cheerfulness, if not of open mirth). Yet he had some faults, and one was a habit of dosing himself, generally from a spirit of enquiry, as in his period of inhaling large quantities of the nitrous oxide and of the vapour of hemp, to say nothing of tobacco, bhang in all its charming varieties in India, betel in Java and the neighbouring islands, qat in the Red Sea, and hallucinating cacti in South America, but sometimes for relief from distress, as when he became addicted to opium in one form or another; and now he was busily poisoning himself with coca-leaves, whose virtue he had learnt in Peru. — Patrick O'Brian

He that would make a pun would pick a pocket. — Patrick O'Brian

Authority is a solvent of humanity: look at any husband, any father of a family,and note the absorption of the person by the persona, the individual by the role. Then multiply the family, and the authority, by some hundreds and see the effect upon a sea-captain, to say nothing of an absolute monarch.Surely man in general is born to be oppressed or solitary, if he is to be fully human; unless it so happens that he is immune to the poison. — Patrick O'Brian

I am opposed to authority, that egg of misery and oppression; I am opposed to it largely for what it does to those who exercise it. — Patrick O'Brian

Jack and Stephen were neither of them human until the first pot of coffee was down, hot and strong. — Patrick O'Brian

What are bashed neeps?"
"Neeps hackit with balmagowry. — Patrick O'Brian

The nymphs in green? Delightful girls.' 'It is clear you have been a great while at sea, to call those sandy-haired coarse-featured pimply short-necked thick-fingered vulgar-minded lubricious blockheads by such a name. Nymphs, forsooth. If they were nymphs, they must have had their being in a tolerably rank and stagnant pool: the wench on my left had an ill breath, and turning for relief I found her sister had a worse; and the upper garment of neither was free from reproach. Worse lay below, I make no doubt. — Patrick O'Brian

Hollom was going forward along the larboard gangway: Nagel, an able seamen but one of the most sullen, bloody-minded and argumentative of the Defenders, was coming aft on the same narrow passage. They were abreast of one another; and Nagel walked straight on without the slightest acknowledgement other than a look of elaborate unconcern. — Patrick O'Brian

Hatred the only moving force, a petulant unhappy striving - childhood the only happiness, and that unknowing; then the continual battle that cannot ever possibly be won; a losing fight against ill-health - poverty for nearly all. Life is a long disease with only one termination and its last years are appalling: weak, racked by the stone, rheumatismal pains, senses going, friends, family, occupation gone, a man must pray for imbecility or a heart of stone. All under sentence of death, often ignominious,frequently agonizing: and then the unspeakable levity with which the faint chance of happiness is thrown away for some jealousy, tiff, sullenness, private vanity, mistaken sense of honour, that deadly, weak and silly notion. — Patrick O'Brian

They were looking after themselves, living with rigid economy; and there was no greater proof of their friendship than the way their harmony withstood their very grave differences in domestic behaviour. In Jack's opinion Stephen was little better than a slut: his papers, odd bits of dry, garlic'd bread, his razors and small-clothes lay on and about his private table in a miserable squalor; and from the appearance of the grizzled wig that was now acting as a tea-cosy for his milk-saucepan, it was clear that he had breakfasted on marmalade.
Jack took off his coat, covered his waistcoat and breeches with an apron, and carried the dishes into the scullery. 'My plate and saucer will serve again,' said Stephen. 'I have blown upon them. I do wish, Jack,' he cried, 'that you would leave that milk-saucepan alone. It is perfectly clean. What more sanitary, what more wholesome, than scalded milk? — Patrick O'Brian

Surely man in general is born to be oppressed or solitary, if he is to be fully human; — Patrick O'Brian

Take a newspaper account of Waterloo or Trafalgar, with all the small advertisements: it seems much more real than reading about it in a history book. — Patrick O'Brian

I do not like to sound discontented neither,' said Pullings, 'nor to crab any ship I belong to; but between you and me, Doctor, between you and me, she is more what we call a floating coffin than a ship. — Patrick O'Brian

I wonder, James, whether it is not too easy for a rich man to despise money — Patrick O'Brian

Jack, I must tell you in your private ear that we have some allies ashore, rather curious allies, I admit, who look after these operations: I hope and trust that you will see many another yard burnt or burning before we reach Durazzo. I am aware that this is not your kind of war, brother: it is not glorious. Yet as you see, it is effective.' 'Do not take me for a bloody-minded man, Stephen, a death-or-glory swashbuckling cove. Believe me, I had rather see a first-rate burnt to the water-line than a ship's boy killed or mutilated. — Patrick O'Brian

But it did not much care for hunting, and then like so many geldings it spent much of its time mourning for its lost stones: a discontented horse. — Patrick O'Brian

In my case, I write in the past because I'm not really part of the present. I have nothing valid to say about anything current, though I have something to say about what existed then. — Patrick O'Brian

Wit is the unexpected copulation of ideas. — Patrick O'Brian

Where there was no equality there was no companionship: when a man was obliged to say 'Yes, sir,' his agreement was of no worth even if it happened to be true. — Patrick O'Brian

The same tantalizing guile and sublime skill ... [The series is] reinforced in its claim to be one of the major literary works of this century ... Only two other writers that this reviewer can think of have each created an entire, discrete and compelling world, a totally believable entity which one might wish to inhabit, and they are Joyce and Proust. It is not pretentious to place Patrick O'Brian in the first canon of literature ... — Kevin Myers

Likings arise when one has no earthly reason for liking - the most wildly improbable marriages and uncommon friendship. — Patrick O'Brian

It would be strange if the weather-gage had to be explained to so old a sea-dog; though I must confess that there was a time when I confused it with that thing which creaks on the roof, showing which way the wind is blowing. Yet could you not obtain this valuable gage by some less arduous means than running a hundred miles and hiding behind a more or less mythical island which no one has ever seen, and that in the dark, a perilous proceeding if ever there was one? — Patrick O'Brian

But you know as well as I, patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country, right or wrong, which is infamous, or my country is always right, which is imbecile. — Patrick O'Brian

I have 60 years of reading to draw upon: naval memoirs, dispatches, the Naval Chronicles, family letters. — Patrick O'Brian

My point is that the admirable men of those times, the Cochranes, Byrons, Falconers, Seymours, Boscawens and the many less famous sailors from whom I have in some degree compounded my characters, are best celebrated in their own splendid actions rather than in imaginary contests; that authenticity is a jewel; and that the echo of their words has an abiding value. — Patrick O'Brian

When you're taking a fence on a horse, you don't think much; your body does all the thinking, and you're over or you're not over. It's much the same when you are doing a tricky thing with a pen. There are times when I'm writing very, very fast. — Patrick O'Brian

Wittles is up' said Killick — Patrick O'Brian

Sir,' said Stephen, 'I read novels with the utmost pertinacity. I look upon them--I look upon good novels--as a very valuable part of literature, conveying more exact and finely-distinguished knowledge of the human heart and mind than almost any other, with greater breadth and depth and fewer constraints. — Patrick O'Brian

The only thing to do was read. Hermit Jim had exactly thirty-eight books. She had inventoried them. There were fairly recent novels by Patrick O'Brian, Dan Simmons, Stephen King, and Dennis Lehane, and some books that she supposed were philosophy by writers like Thoreau. There were classics whose names seemed familiar to her: Oliver Twist, The Sea Wolf, The Big Sleep, Ivanhoe. — Michael Grant

He was conscientious, he did his duty as he understood it; but he was no seaman. — Patrick O'Brian

Do you not find it happens very often, that you are as gay as Garrick at dinner and then by supper-time you wonder why God made the world? — Patrick O'Brian

The first interviews I gave were entirely unpleasant. You have people trying to trip you up with impolite questions that have nothing to do with the books. It's simply vulgar curiosity, and I won't have it. — Patrick O'Brian

One lives in the very present moment; lives intently. There is no urge to be doing: being is the highest good. — Patrick O'Brian

First there was the sky, high, pure and of a darker blue than he had ever seen. And then there was the sea, a lighter, immensely luminous blue that reflected blue into the air, the shadows and the sails; a sea that stretched away immeasurably when the surge raised the frigate high, showing an orderly array of great crests, each three furlongs from its predecessor, and all sweeping eastwards in an even, majestic procession. — Patrick O'Brian

I have often observed that extremely violent noise and activity go with good-fellowship and heightened spirits. — Patrick O'Brian

There is here a striving,avid and worldly civilisation, of course; these huge and eager markets, to this incessant buying and selling, that make that self evident; but I had no conception of the ubiquitous sense of the holy, no notion of how another world can permeate the secular. Filth, stench, disease,"gross superstition" as our people say, extreme poverty, promiscuous universal defecation, do not affect it: nor do they affect my sense of humanity with which I am surrounded. What an agreeable city it is, where a man may walk around naked in the heat if it so please him — Patrick O'Brian

I've come down from the mountains, with an ass-full of specimens... — Patrick O'Brian

Well, damme, William, I am sorry: I am very sorry, indeed I am. But injustice is a rule of the service, as you know very well; and since you have to have a good deal of undeserved abuse, you might just as well have it from your friends. — Patrick O'Brian

You do not mean there is danger of peace?, cried Jack. — Patrick O'Brian

Stephen had spared no expense in making himself more unhappy, his own position as a rejected lover clearer. — Patrick O'Brian

For you must know, gentlemen, that when the mariner is dosed, he likes to know that he has been dosed: with fifteen grains or even less of this valuable substance scenting him and the very air about him there can be no doubt of the matter; and such is the nature of the human mind that he experiences a far greater real benefit than the drug itself would provide, were it deprived of its stench. — Patrick O'Brian

But the world is round,' said Peter. 'It is not,' said Sean. 'How can you say such a wicked thing? Fie.' 'But it is,' cried Peter, 'and if we go on, we shall come back to where we began.' 'Of course we shall,' replied Sean, 'but that is because it is shaped like a cheese. You may go round, as Loegaire did: but you may not go up or down for ever, or you will fall off the ends, as Maire nic Phiarais did and we ourselves almost when we went too far south of the Horn. The whole world knows that. — Patrick O'Brian

Jack, you've debauched my sloth. — Patrick O'Brian

Whereas I had not meant anything so illiberal as a national reflexion, of course; only that I hated Papists. — Patrick O'Brian

This short watch that is about to come, or rather these two short watches
why are they called dog watches? Where, heu, heu, is the canine connection?'
Why,' said Stephen, 'it is because they are curtailed of course. — Patrick O'Brian

I very much dislike being interviewed by the kind of journalist who tries to dig into your private life. — Patrick O'Brian

Come athwart my hawse and I shall ride you down, you half-baked son of an Egyptian fart,' to a wool-gathering jolly-boat; and art echoed from either shore. — Patrick O'Brian

About my books, that's all that I think the public has, in its normal way, to know. My private life is, by definition, private. — Patrick O'Brian

aboard ship, and then hard tack, salt-horse, — Patrick O'Brian

The lookout that first sights the cat shall have ten guineas and remission of sins, short of mutiny, sodomy, or damaging the paintwork. — Patrick O'Brian

What is a potto?"
"It is a little furry creature that sleeps all day with its head between its legs and then walks about very, very slowly all night, high in the trees, slowly eating leaves and creeping up on birds as they roost and eating them too. — Patrick O'Brian

With one hundred miles left to go in the Klondike 200 I began imagining how amazed people would be at the finished line. Entering the Klondike, my sights had been set on merely finishing. — Brian Patrick O'Donoghue

The author says that when an angry impulse is not immediately expressed, it turns to melancholy. — Patrick O'Brian

We understood one another better before ever I opened my mouth — Patrick O'Brian

Oh, the odious wench.How I wish I were rid of her. I have always loathed women, from clew to earring; hook, line and sinker; root and branch.I always said this would happen, you remember; I was against it from the start. Damn it for a flibbertigibbet, the hussy. — Patrick O'Brian

He cannot hold his wine; he has no head for it. Why, on no more than three glasses, for I absolutely poured him out no more, he was on the point of singing Yankee Doodle. Yankee Doodle, in a King's ship, upon my sacred honour! — Patrick O'Brian

The back of my hand to guilt. — Patrick O'Brian

Go and see whether the Doctor is about,' said Jack, 'and if he is, ask him to look in, when he has a moment.'
Which he is in the fish-market, turning over some old-fashioned lobsters. No. I tell a lie. That is him, falling down the companion-way and cursing in foreign. — Patrick O'Brian

What's wrong with (Captain) Jack Aubrey?"
"Everything, since he has a command and I have not. — Patrick O'Brian

For very strangely his officers looked upon Jack Aubrey as a moral figure, in spite of all proofs of the contrary ... — Patrick O'Brian

Good only for destruction - has destroyed all that was valuable in the monarchy - is destroying France with daemonic energy - this tawdry, theatrical empire - a deeply vulgar man - nothing French about him - insane ambition - the whole world one squalid tyranny. His infamous treatment of the Pope! — Patrick O'Brian

I've never set out to seduce my reader. I don't see him at all clearly. — Patrick O'Brian

I have never yet known a man admit that he was either rich or asleep. — Patrick O'Brian

If I were a woman I should march out with a flaming torch and a sword; I should emasculate right and left. — Patrick O'Brian

Oh, what is that bird?'
'It is a wheatear. We have seen between two and three hundred since we set out, and I have told you their name twice, nay, three times. — Patrick O'Brian

Two weevils crept from the crumbs. 'You see those weevils, Stephen?' said Jack solemnly.
I do.'
Which would you choose?'
There is not a scrap of difference. Arcades ambo. They are the same species of curculio, and there is nothing to choose between them.'
But suppose you had to choose?'
Then I should choose the right-hand weevil; it has a perceptible advantage in both length and breadth.'
There I have you,' cried Jack. 'You are bit - you are completely dished. Don't you know that in the Navy you must always choose the lesser of two weevils? Oh ha, ha, ha, ha! — Patrick O'Brian

Jack, you have debauched my sloth. — Patrick O'Brian

They were poor thin little undernourished creatures with only a few blue teeth among them, though young: they had been taken up for combining with others to ask for higher wages and sentenced to transportation; but as they were somewhat less criminal than those who had actually made the demand they were allowed to join the Navy instead. — Patrick O'Brian

(Officially the earliest age was eleven for officers' sons and thirteen for the rest, but no one took much notice of the regulation - seven-year-olds were not unknown.) Before — Patrick O'Brian

Rested, shaved, coffee'd, steaked, you will be a different man. — Patrick O'Brian

If I no longer love Diana,' he wrote, 'what shall I do?' What could he do, with his mainspring, his prime mover gone? He had known that he would love her for ever - to the last syllable of recorded time. He had not sworn it, any more than he had sworn that the sun would rise every morning: it was too certain, too evident: no one swears that he will continue to breathe nor that twice two is four. Indeed, in such a case an oath would imply the possibility of doubt. Yet now it seemed that perpetuity meant eight years, nine months and some odd days, while the last syllable of recorded time was Wednesday, the seventeenth of May. — Patrick O'Brian

Oh, as far as unsexing is concerned, who are we to throw stones? With us any girl that cannot find a husband is unsexed. If she is very high or very low she may go her own way, with the risks entailed therein, but otherwise she must either have no sex or he disgraced. She burns, and she is ridiculed for burning. To say nothing of male tyranny - a wife or a daughter being a mere chattel in most codes of law or custom - and brute force - to say nothing to that, hundreds of thousands of girls are in effect unsexed every generation: and barren women are as much despised as eunuchs. I do assure you, Martin, that if I were a woman I should march out with a flaming torch and a sword; I should emasculate right and left. As for the women of the pahi, I am astonished at their moderation. — Patrick O'Brian

No man born of woman has ever understood spoken Portuguese. — Patrick O'Brian

There are some midshipmen who will never have the decency to lie down and die, whatever the circumstances. Because they are born to be hanged, no doubt,' added the lieutenant darkly. — Patrick O'Brian

You are a reasonably civil, complaisant creature on dry land,' said Stephen, 'but the moment you are afloat you become pragmatical and absolute, a bashaw - do this, do that, gluppit the prawling strangles, there - no longer a social being at all. It is no doubt the effect of the long-continued habit of command; but it cannot be considered amiable. — Patrick O'Brian

As it usually happened after an engagement, a heavy sadness was coming down over his spirits. To some degree it was the prodigious contrastbetween two modes of life: in violent hand-to-hand fighting threr was no room for time, reflexion, enmity or even pain unless it was disabling; everything moved with extreme speed, cut and parry with a reflex as fast as a sword-thrust, eyes automatically keeping watch on three or four men within reach, arm lunging at the first hint of a lowered guard, a cry to warn a friend, a roar to put an enemy off his stroke; and all this in an extraordinarily vivid state of mind, a kind of fierce exaltation, an intense living in the most immediate present. — Patrick O'Brian

There is a systematic flocci-nauci-nihili-pilification of all other aspects of existence that angers me. — Patrick O'Brian

What was independence but a word? What did any form of government matter? Freedom: to do what? — Patrick O'Brian

But, however, I clapped a stopper over his capers.' Dr Maturin was proud of his nautical expressions: sometimes he got them right, but right or wrong he always brought them out with a slight emphasis of satisfaction, much as others might utter a particularly apt Greek or Latin quotation. 'And brought him up with a round stern,' he added. — Patrick O'Brian

Clap on with both hands, sir - never say die - one more heave and we're home, safe and dry. — Patrick O'Brian

From a misanthrope Bacchus makes me sociable ... Yet on the other hand I had already bowed and smiled; I had performed at least the motions of complaisancy; and how often have I not observed that the imitation begets the reality. — Patrick O'Brian

It was an operation that Dr. Maturin had carried out at sea before, always in the fullest possible light and therefore on deck, and many of them had seen him do so.
Now they and all their mates saw him do it again: they saw Joe Plaice's scalp taken off, his skull bared, a disc of bone audibly sawn out, the handle turning solemnly; a three-shilling piece, hammered into a flattened dome by the armourer, screwed on over the hole; and the scalp replaced, neatly sewn up by the parson.
It was extremely gratifying - the Captain had been seen to go pale, and Barret Bonden too, the patient's cousin - blood running down Joe's neck regardless - brains clearly to be seen - something not to be missed for a mint of money - instructive, too - and they made the most of it. — Patrick O'Brian

Virtue should always be colmingled with humor. — Patrick O'Brian