Top 100 Patrick O'Brian Quotes
#1. Surely man in general is born to be oppressed or solitary, if he is to be fully human;
Patrick O'Brian
#2. What is a potto?"
"It is a little furry creature that sleeps all day with its head between its legs and then walks about very, very slowly all night, high in the trees, slowly eating leaves and creeping up on birds as they roost and eating them too.
Patrick O'Brian
#3. Nelson once said that love of his country served him for a greatcoat.
Patrick O'Brian
#4. What's wrong with (Captain) Jack Aubrey?"
"Everything, since he has a command and I have not.
Patrick O'Brian
#5. One lives in the very present moment; lives intently. There is no urge to be doing: being is the highest good.
Patrick O'Brian
#6. I have never yet known a man admit that he was either rich or asleep.
Patrick O'Brian
#7. I know of few men over 50 that seem to me entirely human, virtually none who has long exercised authority.
Patrick O'Brian
#8. She is remarkably dry,' he said to Stephen who, preferring to die in the open, had crept up on deck,
Patrick O'Brian
#9. There are strict rules in these matters, I find.' 'There were strict rules in the arena, too. Every gladiator had to have a sword, oh yes; but if it was Caligula he was to fight with, the sword was made of lead.
Patrick O'Brian
#10. Likings arise when one has no earthly reason for liking - the most wildly improbable marriages and uncommon friendship.
Patrick O'Brian
#11. 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
#12. Should I feel better if I were to vomit?' asked Jagiello. 'I doubt it,' said Stephen. 'It has done nothing for the Colonel.
Patrick O'Brian
#13. But it did not much care for hunting, and then like so many geldings it spent much of its time mourning for its lost stones: a discontented horse.
Patrick O'Brian
#14. Nothing do I know of the law at all. But I do remember that the Bible likens human justice to a woman's unclean rag - quasi pannus menstruate - and I have little faith in truth as an immediate safeguard, in this world.
Patrick O'Brian
#15. No man born of woman has ever understood spoken Portuguese.
Patrick O'Brian
#16. Clap on with both hands, sir - never say die - one more heave and we're home, safe and dry.
Patrick O'Brian
#17. The modesty and diffidence that the penniless, unemployed Standish had brought aboard were now no longer to be seen; and the assurance of a monthly income and a settled position had developed a displeasing and often didactic loquacity. He was also, of course, incompetent.
Patrick O'Brian
#19. The Navy speaks in symbols and you may suit what meaning you choose to the words.
Patrick O'Brian
#20. Oh, the odious wench.How I wish I were rid of her. I have always loathed women, from clew to earring; hook, line and sinker; root and branch.I always said this would happen, you remember; I was against it from the start. Damn it for a flibbertigibbet, the hussy.
Patrick O'Brian
#21. Lord Nelson's maxim 'Never mind manoeuvres: always go straight at 'em.
Patrick O'Brian
#22. Better than a shove in the eye with a dry stick. [- Jack]
Patrick O'Brian
#23. (Officially the earliest age was eleven for officers' sons and thirteen for the rest, but no one took much notice of the regulation - seven-year-olds were not unknown.) Before
Patrick O'Brian
#24. There is so much ignorant prejudice against bees in a dining-room.
Patrick O'Brian
#25. My wife and I have spent most of our lives in France, and we are both pretty well bilingual, my wife more purely than I, since as a little girl she went to school in French Switzerland.
Patrick O'Brian
#26. 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.
Patrick O'Brian
#27. For a moment Jack felt the strongest inclination to snatch up his little gilt chair and beat the white-faced man down with it ...
Patrick O'Brian
#28. Jack had never been a hypocrite until he became a father, and even now it did not come easy.
Patrick O'Brian
#29. all that wretched schoolmastering.' 'On some it acts like a poison, making them unfit for the society of grown men.
Patrick O'Brian
#30. Martin was a thoroughly amiable man, a man of wide reading, but when he came to write he mounted upon a pair of stilts, unusually lofty stilts, and staggered along at a most ungracious pace, with an occasional awkward lurch into colloquialism, giving a strikingly false impression of himself.
Patrick O'Brian
#31. Puddings, my dear sir?' cried Graham.
Puddings. We trice 'em athwart the starboard gumbrils, when sailing by and large.
Patrick O'Brian
#32. I have never written for an audience. On the other hand I do not write merely to please myself.
Patrick O'Brian
#33. It all gave a pleasant illusion of eternity, this quiet sailing under a perfect sky towards a horizon perpetually five miles ahead, never nearer.
Patrick O'Brian
#35. Where there was no equality there was no companionship: when a man was obliged to say 'Yes, sir,' his agreement was of no worth even if it happened to be true.
Patrick O'Brian
#36. Oh for women at sea to obviate the eternal crosscat-harpings,' he said to himself, 'to do away with the grumlinfuttocks, and to inject a little civilization, even of an equivocal nature, even at the risk of moral deviation.
Patrick O'Brian
#37. About my books, that's all that I think the public has, in its normal way, to know. My private life is, by definition, private.
Patrick O'Brian
#38. After all a book can be represented as a conversation with one's demon.
Patrick O'Brian
#39. Rested, shaved, coffee'd, steaked, you will be a different man.
Patrick O'Brian
#40. He reflected on his hitherto reflection that soldiers and sailors were, upon the whole, quite different creatures. 'And perhaps they are, too: yet perhaps drink, in very large quantities, may make the difference less evident.
Patrick O'Brian
#41. From a misanthrope Bacchus makes me sociable ... Yet on the other hand I had already bowed and smiled; I had performed at least the motions of complaisancy; and how often have I not observed that the imitation begets the reality.
Patrick O'Brian
#42. Take it easy, Teague,'said another. But Peter would not take it easy: he hesitated, trying to quell the wild indignation; but he failed; it possessed him, and with a furious shriek he hurled himself upon his country's oppressors.
Patrick O'Brian
#43. Let us drink to the renewed success of Irish arms, and confusion to the Pope.
Patrick O'Brian
#44. You have not bought the right to a truthful answer: your truth has not bought it. Sincerity is not to be bought: it is given, if it comes at all - given or inflicted. And really, you cannot invade a man's privacy like that.
Patrick O'Brian
#47. There are some midshipmen who will never have the decency to lie down and die, whatever the circumstances. Because they are born to be hanged, no doubt,' added the lieutenant darkly.
Patrick O'Brian
#48. Jack and Stephen were neither of them human until the first pot of coffee was down, hot and strong.
Patrick O'Brian
#49. Come all you thoughtless young men,
a warning take by me
And never leave your happy homes
to sail the raging sea.
Patrick O'Brian
#50. For very strangely his officers looked upon Jack Aubrey as a moral figure, in spite of all proofs of the contrary ...
Patrick O'Brian
#51. And although in many cases these unions proved happy enough, sailors being excellent husbands, often away and handy about the house when ashore, it did make for a curious gathering when the spouses were invited to a ball.
Patrick O'Brian
#52. Wondering just how Mr Church thought he had deserved anything short of impalement, Stephen walked into the cabin.
Patrick O'Brian
#53. I've come down from the mountains, with an ass-full of specimens...
Patrick O'Brian
#55. men strike out their permanent characters; or have those characters struck into them
Patrick O'Brian
#56. . . . 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
#57. We understood one another better before ever I opened my mouth
Patrick O'Brian
#59. You can't be happy if you're not tolerably happy with yourself. The addition of friends adds immeasurably to life.
Patrick O'Brian
#61. 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
#62. He cannot hold his wine; he has no head for it. Why, on no more than three glasses, for I absolutely poured him out no more, he was on the point of singing Yankee Doodle. Yankee Doodle, in a King's ship, upon my sacred honour!
Patrick O'Brian
#63. There is a systematic flocci-nauci-nihili-pilification of all other aspects of existence that angers me.
Patrick O'Brian
#64. I am in favour of leaving people alone, however imperfect their polity may seem. It appears to me that you must not tell other nations how to set their house in order; nor must you compel them to be happy.
Patrick O'Brian
#65. Take a newspaper account of Waterloo or Trafalgar, with all the small advertisements: it seems much more real than reading about it in a history book.
Patrick O'Brian
#66. The author says that when an angry impulse is not immediately expressed, it turns to melancholy.
Patrick O'Brian
#67. The newly-minted captain admits the irony between the gold on his shoulders and the lack of gold in his pockets.
Patrick O'Brian
#68. It must be a weary life, being in a permanent state of rage or at least at half-cock.
Patrick O'Brian
#69. Touch and away, Jack?' asked Stephen. 'Touch and away? Do you not recall that I have important business there? Enquiries of the very first interest?'
To do with our enterprise? To do with this voyage?'
Perhaps not quite directly.
Patrick O'Brian
#71. I have often observed that extremely violent noise and activity go with good-fellowship and heightened spirits.
Patrick O'Brian
#72. It has always seemed to me that books are the supreme decorations of a room
Patrick O'Brian
#73. I am not master of words to tell you, Jack, the value of an exceedingly remote island to a naturalist, an uninhabited fertile volcanic island covered with a luxuriant vegetation, with no vile rats, dogs, cats, goats, swine, introduced by fools to destroy an Eden, an island untouched ...
Patrick O'Brian
#74. Since I grew up, I have never deliberately used any technique at all other than the physical shaping of my tale so that it more or less resembles what has been thought of as a novel for these last two hundred years.
Patrick O'Brian
#75. 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.
Patrick O'Brian
#76. For Captain Aubrey, as for the rest of brute creation, there were only two kinds of birds, the edible and the inedible.
Patrick O'Brian
#77. The lookout that first sights the cat shall have ten guineas and remission of sins, short of mutiny, sodomy, or damaging the paintwork.
Patrick O'Brian
#79. Yet whether wisdom can be any more profitably pursued than happiness is a question.
Patrick O'Brian
#81. On a ship, everything is enclosed: the people are right on top of each other and can't get up and walk away.
Patrick O'Brian
#82. But when a man puts on maturity and invulnerability, it seems that he necessarily becomes indifferent to many things that gave him joy.
Patrick O'Brian
#83. I do not like to sound discontented neither,' said Pullings, 'nor to crab any ship I belong to; but between you and me, Doctor, between you and me, she is more what we call a floating coffin than a ship.
Patrick O'Brian
#84. Wallis,' said Maturin, 'I am happy to see you. How is your penis?
Patrick O'Brian
#85. I have 60 years of reading to draw upon: naval memoirs, dispatches, the Naval Chronicles, family letters.
Patrick O'Brian
#86. For my own part,' said Captain Aubrey, 'I have no notion of disliking a man for his beliefs, above all if he was born with them. I find I can get along very well with Jews or even ... ' The P of Papists was already formed, and the word was obliged to come out as Pindoos.
Patrick O'Brian
#87. Stephen had spared no expense in making himself more unhappy, his own position as a rejected lover clearer.
Patrick O'Brian
#88. There never was a ship that fought well without she was a happy ship.
Patrick O'Brian
#89. Still, the farther hills remained as untouched as the sea; high, remote, arid, dark and sterile, poisoned with the sun.
Patrick O'Brian
#90. Whereas I had not meant anything so illiberal as a national reflexion, of course; only that I hated Papists.
Patrick O'Brian
#91. The first interviews I gave were entirely unpleasant. You have people trying to trip you up with impolite questions that have nothing to do with the books. It's simply vulgar curiosity, and I won't have it.
Patrick O'Brian
#92. The pleasant thing about fighting with the Spaniards, Mr Ellis,' said Jack, smiling at his great round eyes and solemn face, 'is not that they are shy, for they are not, but that they are never, never ready.
Patrick O'Brian
#93. He was conscientious, he did his duty as he understood it; but he was no seaman.
Patrick O'Brian
#94. Although wealth may not bring happiness, the immediate prospect of it provides a wonderfully close imitation.
Patrick O'Brian
#95. Sometimes you receive a knock in action: it may be your death-wound or just a scratch
Patrick O'Brian
#96. For me the process works best with no interruptions, no breaks in the steady application, no letters to be answered, very little social life, no holidays; it is therefore a form of happy imprisonment.
Patrick O'Brian
#97. Diana accepted the bait, spat out the hook with contempt, and hurried away to the stables to consult with Thomas,
Patrick O'Brian
#98. In a day when, if you insulted a man it might cost you your life, you were probably more civil.
Patrick O'Brian
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