Quotes from Patrick O'Brian

Stephen, what is the French for a double sister-block, coaked? With a pair of them and a proper hold-fast, I could raise the Temple.' 'A double sister-block, coaked? The Dear alone can tell. I do not even know what it is in English.

Stephen had been bumped into once or twice and had 'By your leave, sir,' and 'Way there – oh parding, sir' roared into his ear often enough, he walked composedly into the cabin, sat on Jack's locker and reflected upon the nature of a community – its reality – its difference from every one of the individuals composing it – communication within it, how effected.

Since Fry had helped to write the catalog he was obliged to be civil: The Times was not. Having dealt with Matisse, the paper said, the art of M. Picasso is a very different matter. He, too, is not a charlatan, but we do not believe that he is an artist of narrow and intense originality like M. Matisse. Rather he seems to us to be by nature extremely imitative, and to have endeavoured to preserve himself from imitation by the pursuit

A sailor, who may be absent for years, throws impossible strains on his wife. If she is a woman of any degree of temperament at all there is of course the question of chastity; and in either case there is that of command or perhaps I should say of decision.

The moon's tip appeared above the sea. A gunboat fired: deep, booming note – the voice of an old solitary hound.

None of this depressed Picasso, nor yet Kahnweiler: there is a kind of abuse that is a guarantee of excellence and almost of success, for surely people do not utter such shrill and vehement protests unless some Freudian resistance is at work—unless at some level they are aware of the validity of what they see.

he observed that it was strange how differently wine took different men – some grew glum and fault-finding, some quarrelsome or tearful; for his part he found it did not affect him at all, except perhaps to make him like people rather more, and to make the world seem a more cheerful place. 'Not that it could be much more cheerful than it is already,' he added

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.

or there will be wigs on the green.

But my dear sir, the United Irishmen were primarily Protestants – their leaders were Protestants. Wolfe Tone and Napper Tandy were Protestants. The Emmets, the O'Connors, Simon Butler, Hamilton Rowan, Lord Edward Fitzgerald were Protestants. And the whole idea of the club was to unite Protestant and Catholic and Presbyterian Irishmen. The Protestants it was who took the initiative.

have never yet known a man admit that he was either rich or asleep: perhaps the poor man and the wakeful man have some great moral advantage. How does it arise?

often an unfinished picture is all the more interesting for the bare canvas.

He considered old age and its mutilations and wondered what it would do for him:

There are strict rules in these matters, I find.' 'There were strict rules in the arena, too. Every gladiator had to have a sword, oh yes; but if it was Caligula he was to fight with, the sword was made of lead.

When I was in a Guineaman, between the wars, there was a certain sorts of blacks called Whydaws, or Whydoos, that used to die by the dozen in the Middle Passage, out of mere despair at being taken away from their country and their friends. We used to save a good many by touching them up with a horse-whip in the mornings.

A conquering race, in the place of that conquest, is rarely amiable; the conquerors pay less obviously than the conquered, but perhaps in time they pay even more heavily, in the loss of the humane qualities. Hard, arrogant, profit-seeking adventurers flock to the spoil, and the natives, though outwardly civil, contemplate them with a resentment mingled with contempt, while at the same time respecting the face of conquest – acknowledging their greater strength.

As I have said, the social contract is not the same in Catalonia as it is in France; superficially it is rougher in some ways, but beneath the surface it is often far more friendly, direct, and indeed more sensitive.

certainly. Would

What private lives the young led, he reflected, how very much apart: their happiness how widely independent of circumstance.

Please tell the Senhor that I have never eaten better porco in my life,' said Jack, holding up a bare white bone. Jack had a variety of little imbecilities, but none irritated Stephen more than his way of tossing in the odd word or two of a foreign language.

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

There is nothing that interests me more than travel, I declare; and if I had had my health, I should have been a great traveller, a second–a second– St Paul? No, no. A second Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

in the mean time I take the liberty of sending you this hermaphroditic crab, whose singularity I am sure your keen eye will appreciate

these weeks and months of precious seniority slipping away – already Douglas of the Phoebe, Evans on the West Indies station, and a man he did not know called Raitt had been made; they were in the last Gazette and now they were ahead of him on the immutable list of post-captains; he would be junior to them for ever.