“The weather had freshened almost to coldness, for the wind was coming more easterly, from the chilly currents between Tristan and the Cape; the sloth was amazed by the change; it shunned the deck and spent its time below. Jack was in his cabin, pricking the chart with less satisfaction than he could have wished: progress, slow, serious trouble with the mainmast-- unaccountable headwinds by night-- and sipping a glass of grog; Stephen was in the mizentop, teaching Bonden to write and scanning the sea for his first albatross. The sloth sneezed, and looking up, Jack caught its gaze fixed upon him; its inverted face had an expression of anxiety and concern. 'Try a piece of this, old cock,' he said, dipping his cake in the grog and proffering the sop. 'It might put a little heart into you.' The sloth sighed, closed its eyes, but gently absorbed the piece, and sighed again.
Some minutes later he felt a touch upon his knee: the sloth had silently climbed down and it was standing there, its beady eyes looking up into his face, bright with expectation. More cake, more grog: growing confidence and esteem. After this, as soon as the drum had beat the retreat, the sloth would meet him, hurrying toward the door on its uneven legs: it was given its own bowl, and it would grip it with its claws, lowering its round face into it and pursing its lips to drink (its tongue was too short to lap). Sometimes it went to sleep in this position, bowed over the emptiness.
'In this bucket,' said Stephen, walking into the cabin, 'in this small half-bucket, now, I have the population of Dublin, London, and Paris combined: these animalculae-- what is the matter with the sloth?' It was curled on Jack's knee, breathing heavily: its bowl and Jack's glass stood empty on the table. Stephen picked it up, peered into its affable bleary face, shook it, and hung it upon its rope. It seized hold with one fore and one hind foot, letting the others dangle limp, and went to sleep.
Stephen looked sharply round, saw the decanter, smelt to the sloth, and cried, 'Jack, you have debauched my sloth.”
― Patrick O'Brian, quote from H.M.S. Surprise
“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, quote from H.M.S. Surprise
“Stephen had spared no expense in making himself more unhappy, his own position as a rejected lover clearer.”
― Patrick O'Brian, quote from H.M.S. Surprise
“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, quote from H.M.S. Surprise
“Jack, you have debauched my sloth.”
― Patrick O'Brian, quote from H.M.S. Surprise
“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, quote from H.M.S. Surprise
“Valuable and ingenious he might be, thought Jack, fixing him with his glass, but false he was too, and perjured. He had voluntarily sworn to have no truck with vampires, and here, attached to his bosom, spread over it and enfolded by one arm, was a greenish hairy thing, like a mat - a loathsome great vampire of the most poisonous kind, no doubt. ‘I should never have believed it of him: his sacred oath in the morning watch and now he stuffs the ship with vampires; and God knows what is in that bag. No doubt he was tempted, but surely he might blush for his fall?’
No blush; nothing but a look of idiot delight as he came slowly up the side, hampered by his burden and comforting it in Portuguese as he came.
‘I am happy to see that you were so successful, Dr Maturin,’ he said, looking down into the launch and the canoes, loaded with glowing heaps of oranges and shaddocks, red meat, iguanas, bananas, greenstuff. ‘But I am afraid no vampires can be allowed on board.’
‘This is a sloth,’ said Stephen, smiling at him. ‘A three-toed sloth, the most affectionate, discriminating sloth you can imagine!’ The sloth turned its round head, fixed its eyes on Jack, uttered a despairing wail, and buried its face again in Stephen’s shoulder, tightening its grip to the strangling-point.”
― Patrick O'Brian, quote from H.M.S. Surprise
“Of course I do know it is the French who are so wicked; but there are all these people who keep coming and going - the Austrians, the Spaniards, the Russians. Pray, are the Russians good now? It would be very shocking - treason no doubt - to put the wrong people in my prayers.”
― Patrick O'Brian, quote from H.M.S. Surprise
“All your sea-omens are of disaster; and of course, with man in his present unhappy state, huddled together in numbers far too great and spending all his surplus time and treasure beating out his brother's brains, any gloomy foreboding is likely to be fulfilled; but your corpse, your parson, your St Elmo's fire is not the cause of the tragedy.”
― Patrick O'Brian, quote from H.M.S. Surprise
“there never was a ship that fought well without she was a happy ship.”
― Patrick O'Brian, quote from H.M.S. Surprise
“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, quote from H.M.S. Surprise
“Stephen came on deck reflecting with satisfaction upon his sloth, now a parlour-boarder with the Irish Franciscans at Rio, and a secret drinker of the altar-wine.”
― Patrick O'Brian, quote from H.M.S. Surprise
“Killick was a cross-grained bastard, who supposed that if he sprinkled his discourse with a good many sirs, the words in between did not signify:”
― Patrick O'Brian, quote from H.M.S. Surprise
“God,’ he thought, ‘never let me outlive my wits.”
― Patrick O'Brian, quote from H.M.S. Surprise
“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, quote from H.M.S. Surprise
“. . . nunc et in hora mortis nostrae,’ he repeated yet again, and felt the lap of water on his foot. He looked up. The people had gone; the pyre was no more than a dark patch with the sea hissing in its embers; and he was alone. The tide was rising fast.”
― Patrick O'Brian, quote from H.M.S. Surprise
“Stephen looked sharply round, saw the decanter, smelt to the sloth, and cried, ‘Jack, you have debauched my sloth.”
― Patrick O'Brian, quote from H.M.S. Surprise
“variety of other wise saws sprang to Stephen’s indignant mind – words and feathers are carried off by the wind; as is the wedding, so is the cake; do not speak Arabic in the house of the Moor; pleasures pass but sorrows stay; love, grief and money cannot be concealed”
― Patrick O'Brian, quote from H.M.S. Surprise
“A possible explanation may be this: in addition to professional competence, cheerful resignation, an excellent liver, natural authority and a hundred other virtues, there must be the far rarer quality of resisting the effects, the dehumanising effects, of the exercise of authority. Authority is a solvent of humanity: look”
― Patrick O'Brian, quote from H.M.S. Surprise
“On and on she sailed, in warmer seas but void, as though they alone had survived Deucalion’s flood; as though all land had vanished from the earth; and once again the ship’s routine dislocated time and temporal reality so that this progress was an endless dream, even a circular dream, contained within an unbroken horizon and punctuated only by the sound of guns thundering daily in preparation for an enemy whose real existence it was impossible to conceive.”
― Patrick O'Brian, quote from H.M.S. Surprise
“Surely man in general is born to be oppressed or solitary, if he is to be fully human;”
― Patrick O'Brian, quote from H.M.S. Surprise
“Wondering just how Mr Church thought he had deserved anything short of impalement, Stephen walked into the cabin.”
― Patrick O'Brian, quote from H.M.S. Surprise
“Oh yes, they assured him, with grave, anxious faces; they were in horrid danger of foundering, broaching-to, running violently into Australia; but there was a hope, just a very slight hope, of their meeting with a mountain of ice and clambering on to it – as many as half a dozen men might be saved.”
― Patrick O'Brian, quote from H.M.S. Surprise
“nunc et in hora mortis nostrae,”
― Patrick O'Brian, quote from H.M.S. Surprise
“Few had much room to cast stones, but hypocrisy has never failed the English middle class in any latitude, and they flung them in plenty with delighted, shocked abandon – rocks, boulders, limited in size only by fear for their husband’s advancement. Conciliating discretion had never been among Mrs Villiers’s qualities, and if subjects for malignant gossip had been wanting she would have provided them by the elephant-load.”
― Patrick O'Brian, quote from H.M.S. Surprise
“Good heavens,’ cried Mr White. ‘To fire great iron balls at people you have never even spoken to – barbarity is come again.”
― Patrick O'Brian, quote from H.M.S. Surprise
“Never mind the disappointment. Salt water will wash it away. You will be amazed how unimportant it will seem in a week’s time – how everything will fall into place.”
― Patrick O'Brian, quote from H.M.S. Surprise
Patrick O'Brian
Born place: in Chalfont St. Peter, Buckinghamshire, The United Kingdom
Born date December 12, 1914
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“That damn mara was an emotional ninja, sneaking up on your heart when you least expected it.”
― Rachel Vincent, quote from With All My Soul
“Maddy shook her head, as if the movement could somehow shake the reality away. She simply couldn’t believe it. That by saving her he had
actually, knowingly put himself in line for a consequence this severe. So much was kept hidden about the Angels, about how they handled their
internal affairs—brutally, it turned out. All the while they put on a smooth, clean exterior for the public and the media.
“What can I do?” she said finally.
Jacks looked at her through the deluge.
“Come with me.”
There he stood in the pouring rain, the image of shirtless soaked perfection. He stood before her offering her a choice just like he had the
night they went flying. She was at another crossroads. She knew she could just leave. Knew she probably should. But they were going to take his
wings, and it was all her fault. Her fault for going to the party, her fault for trying to follow through with her plan, her fault for leaving and insisting on
walking home. Could she really leave him now? Before she had even decided, her mouth opened.
“Yes,” she said. Just like when he had invited her to the party. It simply came out, as though her true desires could no longer be repressed.
Jacks smiled a dripping, radiant smile. A flash of lightning lit the roof, followed closely by a bark of thunder.”
― Scott Speer, quote from Immortal City
“The greedy and the power-hungry will always look for ways to break the rules, or twist them to their advantage.”
― David Brin, quote from The Postman
“One of the mistakes many of us make is that we feel sorry for ourselves, or for others, thinking that life should be fair, or that someday it will be. It's not and it won't. When we make this mistake we tend to spend a lot of time wallowing and/or complaining about what's wrong with life. "It's not fair," we complain, not realizing that, perhaps, it was never intended to be.”
― Richard Carlson, quote from Don't Sweat the Small Stuff ... and it's all small stuff: Simple Ways to Keep the Little Things from Taking Over Your Life
“Welcome to Sanctuary, my home and the focus of the Imperials, whom I serve and direct. This is an island of force in Free Alaska, of the planet Earth, and the system of mankind.
We are those who wage eternal war against tyranny. We are those who choose death over submission. Freedom over oppression. And honor always.
Choose our values, and you will have found a friend. Choose to control a free spirit and we will control you. Decide for others and we will decide for you.
Use force against the vulnerable and our force will render you helpless. Practice coercion and we will oppress you.
Bring strife to mankind and we will bring you war!
Now is the time for your misgivings and complaints. Now is the time for you to voice your concerns and your apprehensions. Stand now and speak in freedom. Speak your mind and you will be heard. If you be injured, say now by whom. If you seek redress and your cause be just, I will stand with you. If a wrong can be righted, I will undertake that task. If it is I that have offended, show me my error and I will correct it.
This is also the time for blood, if blood is what you seek. Here you can fight, if only combat will give you satisfaction. Here you can win in trial by ordeal, but here too you can lose. If your cause be as important as life itself to you, it is here you can wager your life. Fairness is intended, but beware that here lies the intent to prevail.|
Your cause, if true, would be better served by reason, for with reason the Imperials can be moved. Force is the resort of passion, but passion may serve evil or good. Here it serves us and we will stand by its consequences even if it takes us all from the Earth.
It is said where you find those who live by the sword you will find those who die by the sword. Look no further. You have found those who make such a choice for their life.
You have found the Imperials. I am their Voice.
Speak for yourself now if you will.”
― William C. Samples, quote from Fe Fi FOE Comes
House Harkonnen
Red Country
Black Box
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