The Terror

Luckily, even as a young man not yet become himself, John Bridgens had two things besides indecision that kept him from self-destruction - books and a sense of irony.

We are all eaters of souls.

Francis Crozier believes in nothing. Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. It has no plan, no point, no hidden mysteries that make up for the oh-so-obvious miseries and banalities. Nothing he has learned in the past six months has persuaded him otherwise. Has it?

Men who read a lot have a more sensitive disposition, added Fowler. [...] I did not know what to say to this. Maybe reading is a sort of curse is all I mean, concluded Fowler. Maybe it's better for a man to stay inside his own mind. Amen, I felt like saying, although I do not know why.

The words sounded like a mournful incantation.

All this natural misery,” Dr. Goodsir said suddenly. “Why do you men have to add to it? Why does our species always have to take our full measure of God-given misery and terror and mortality and then make it worse? Can you answer me that, Mr. Hickey?

The captain of HMS Terror often thought that he knew nothing about the future - other than that his ship and Erebus would never again steam or sail - but then he reminded himself of one certainty: when his store of whiskey was gone, Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier was going to blow his brains out.

The Ice Master was too injured and too exhausted to crawl any farther. Let whatever was going to happen to him happen now and may a Sailor's God fuck to Hell this fucking thing that was going to eat him.

He enjoyed the soft sound of night wind and the knowledge that he was the only boy — perhaps the only human being — out there in the dark on the windy, frozen-grass meadows on this night that smelled of coming snow, alienated from the lighted windows and the warm hearths, very aware that he was of the village but not part of it at that moment. It was a thrilling, almost erotic feeling — an illicit discovery of self separated from everyone and everything else in the cold and dark

Francis Crozier now understood that the most desirable and erotic thing a woman could wear were the many modest layers such as Sophia Cracroft wore to dinner in the governor's house, enough silken fabric to conceal the lines of her body, allowing a man to concentrate on the exciting loveliness of her wit

who, like Crozier, would rather have his kidney stones removed with a spoon than be forced to suffer sermons —

In his twenties, John Bridgens most identified with Hamlet. The strangely aging Prince of Denmark—Bridgens was quite sure that the boy Hamlet had magically aged over a few theatrical weeks to a man who was, at the very least, in his thirties by Act V—had been suspended between thought and deed, between motive and action, frozen by a consciousness so astute and unrelenting that it made him think about everything, even thought itself.

Trust me. I’ve seen it in London and I’ve seen it with shipwreck. Death by scurvy is worse. It would be better if the Thing took us all tonight. And with that we went below to the flame-flickering Darkness of the lower deck and to a cold almost the equal of the Dante-esque Ninth Circle Arctic Night without.

God is our refuge and strength, and ever-prethent help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountainth fall into the heart of the sea, though its waterth roar and foam and the mountains quake with their thurging.

guile was no match for the world and that hubris would always be punished by the gods.

I was full of piss and vinegar in those days, not to mention too stupid to know better, in other words still in my twenties,