Quotes from Patrick O'Brian

However, there was nobody missing, and after a brief inspection Mowett could report 'All present and sober, sir, if you please,' without more falsehood than could be borne, since the few hands who were still drunk by naval standards did not fall until after the inspection; and they were quietly slung on to camels' backs among the tents and seamen's bags.

In times of stress Jack Aubrey had two main reactions: he either became aggressive or he became amorous; he longed either for the violent catharsis of action or for that of making love. He loved a battle: he loved a wench.

Once removed from cricket, Martin became a reasonable companion again, and they took particular delight in the whinchats and wheatears on Ports Down and in a middle-spotted woodpecker eating ants like its great green cousin, which neither had seen before; but once they were in the town the future husband tended to predominate.

Why, to be sure, something sad seems to happen to your great men and your admirals, with age, pretty often: even to your post-captains. A kind of atrophy, a withering-away of the head and the heart. I conceive it may arise from Ã¢â'¬Â¦

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.

making a film with Georges Clouzot, Le Mystère Picasso.

The long pause before action was always hard to bear, but now in a few seconds everything would vanish but for the living instant – no sadness, no time for fear.

They were not much to look at, he reflected, as the whip from the yardarm hoisted up their meagre belongings: three or four were decidedly simple, and two others had that indefinable air of men of some parts whose cleverness sets them apart from their fellows, but not nearly so far as they imagine.

Would you expect a mutiny?' 'Mutiny in the sense of outright revolt and refusal of command? No. But from some of the people I expect muttering, discontent, ill-will; and nothing makes work slower or more inefficient or more unsafe than ill-will and its perpetual quarrels.

If men were to consider what they were at – if they were to look about them, and reflect upon the cost of life in a universe where prisons, brothels, madhouses, and regiments of men armed and trained to kill other men are so very common – why, I doubt we should see many of these poor mewling little larval victims, so often a present misery to their parents and a future menace to their kind.

There was something disagreeable, and somehow reptilian, about the cold, contained way Stephen took up his stance, raised his pistol, looked along the barrel with his pale eyes, and shot the head off the king of hearts.

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.

The sensation of falling into the past is not unlike that of coming home for the holidays.

Mrs Williams was a woman, in the natural course of things; but she was a woman so emphatically, so totally a woman, that she was almost devoid of any private character.

He derives a greater pleasure from a smaller stream of wit than any man I have ever known.

There she lays,' he cried. 'Oh there she lays! Ain't she the loveliest thing you ever saw?' 'She is, too,' said Stephen, for even to his profound ignorance she stood out among the common workaday vessels like a thoroughbred in a troop of cart-horses.

One of the miseries of medical life is that on the one hand you know what shocking things can happen to the human body and on the other you know how very little we can really do about most of them. You are therefore denied the comfort of faith.

Well, my lord, the one was something that dropped on my head - a piece of mortar-shell, I imagine; but luckily I was in the water at the time, so it did little damage, only tearing off a handsbreadth of scalp. The other was a sword-thrust I did not notice at the moment, but it seems it nicked some vessel, and most of my blood ran out before I was aware. Dr Maturin said he did not suppose there was more than three ounces left, and that mostly in my toes.

Now listen, Jack, will you? I am somewhat given to lying: my occasions require it from time to time. But I do not choose to have any man alive tell me of it.

Do you mean to fight with her?' 'I mean to sink, take, burn or destroy her,' said Jack, a smile flashing across his face.

And although Jack could hear the master's shoes crunching on the deck some inches above his head, he could not possibly divine the particular emotional disturbance and the sickening dread of exposure that filled the poor man's loving heart. But he knew very well that his tight, self-contained world was hopelessly out of tune and he was haunted by the depressing sentiment of failure – of not having succeeded in what he had set out to do.

It is as though -- oh, a thousand wild possibilities. I am lost, and I am disturbed. Yet I think I may be cured; this is a fever of the blood, and laudanum will cool it.

A people that has had its ancient laws and customs taken from it, whose language and history count for nothing, and whose temples have been sacked and thrown down is apt to be morose

I matrimoni degli altri sono una perpetua fonte di perplessità», commentò Stephen.