Quotes from Apsley Cherry-Garrard

And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore.

When I went South I never meant to write a book: I rather despised those who did so as being of an inferior brand to those who did things and said nothing about them. But that they say nothing is too often due to the fact that they have nothing to say, or are too idle or too busy to learn how to say it. Every one who has been through such an extraordinary experience has much to say, and ought to say it if he has any faculty that way.

He remarked afterwards to me, apropos to Hooper, that it was a curious thing that a number of men, knowing that there was nothing they could do, could quietly watch a man fighting for his life, and he did not think that any but the British temperament could do so.

It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more.

Last entry. "For God's sake, look after our people.

There is nothing so irritating as the man who is always coming in and informing all and sundry that he has repaired his sledge, or built a wall, or filled the cooker, or mended his socks.

Unfortunately the dogs misunderstood their orders and, instead of piloting us, dashed off on their own. We saw them like specks in the distance in the direction of the old seal crack.

Whilst we knew what we had suffered and risked better than any one else, we also knew that science takes no account of such things; that a man is no better for having made the worst journey in the world; and that whether he returns alive or drops by the way will be all the same a hundred years hence if his records and specimens come safely to hand.

a moderate roll rings the bell, and a big roll brings out the cook.

If you think your own life hard, and would like to leave it for a short hour I recommend you to beg, borrow or steal this tale, and read and see how the penguins live. It is all quite true.

Yes! comfortable, warm reader. Men do not fear death, they fear the pain of dying.

We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint....

Then some prayers from the Burial Service: and there with the floor-cloth under them and the tent above we buried them in their sleeping-bags—and surely their work has not been in vain.

Take it all in all, I do not believe anybody on earth has a worse time than an Emperor penguin.

The point, one begins to see, was not merely to survive; it was to come through intact, true to one's most decent self — in short, to survive as English gentlemen.

Poor trustful creatures! If I could have done it then, I would gladly have killed them rather than picture them starving on that floe out on the Ross Sea, or eaten by the exultant Killers that cruised around.

We traveled for science: those three small embryos from Cape Crozier, that weight of fossils from Barkley Island, and that mass of material less spectacular but gathered just as carefully hour by hour, in wind and drift, darkness and cold, was striven for in order that the world may have a little more knowledge, that it may build on what it knows instead of on what it thinks.

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a Heaven for? R. Browning, Andrea del Sarto.

Five men went forward, Scott, Wilson, Bowers, Oates and Seaman Evans. They reached the Pole on January 17 to find that Amundsen had reached it thirty-four days earlier. They returned 721 statute miles and perished 177 miles from their winter quarters.

I for one had come to that point of suffering at which I did not really care if only I could die without much pain. They talk of the heroism of the dying—they little know—it would be so easy to die, a dose of morphia, a friendly crevasse, and blissful sleep. The trouble is to go on....

And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore.

Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.

Take it all in all, I do not believe anybody on Earth has it worse than an Emperor penguin.

If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin's egg.