Quotes About Landsman

There is not so helpless and pitiable an object in the world as a landsman beginning a sailor's life.

The sight . . . is enough to make a landsman dream for a week about death, peril and shipwreck.

The sailor is frankness, the landsman is finesse. Life is not a game with the sailor, demanding the long head

Jesus Fucking Christ," she says with that flawless hardpan accent of hers. It is an expression that always strikes Landsman as curious, or at least as something that he would pay money to see.

He has the memory of a convict, the balls of a fireman, and the eyesight of a housebreaker. When there is crime to fight, Landsman tears around Sitka like a man with his pant leg caught on a rocket. It's like there's a film score playing behind him, heavy on the castanets. The problem comes in the hours when he isn't working, when his thoughts start blowing out the open window of his brain like pages from the blotter. Sometimes it takes a heavy paperweight to pin them down.

Bina and Landsman were twisted together, a braided pair of chromosomes with a mystery flaw. And now? Now each of them pretends not to see the other and looks away. Landsman looks away.

Landsman has put a lot of work into the avoidance of having to understand concepts like that of the eruv, but he knows that it's a typical Jewish ritual dodge, a scam run on God, that controlling motherfucker.

Just to spite himself, because spiting himself, spiting others, spiting the world is the pastime and only patrimony of Landsman and his people.

So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.

If you talked to the landsmen face to face they seemed capable of reason, but put them in charge of things, of objects and language and sounds and they became idiots.

That and rum and tobacco—and being boys, we were not entitled to the rum. 'Rum, bum and baccy.' And that was why 'bum' was included—that, and not buggery, as the landsmen thought.