Top 100 Patrick O'brian Quotes
#1. Some of you ... have never read a Patrick O'Brian novel. I beseech you to start now. Start with Master and Commander, which should be available in paperback from your nearest bookseller. And if he-or she-does not have a copy, then beat the wretched fellow.
Kevin Myers
#2. I sailed a bit as a child, but it wasn't until I was around 40, when I was halfway through Patrick O'Brian's 'Master and Commander' novels, that I had the sudden epiphany that I had to go sail on a square-rig ship.
Billy Campbell
#3. Brings [O'Brian's] achievement to a new height ... Such is O'Brian's power to possess the imagination that I found I was living in his world as much as my own, wanting to know what happens next. That is the real test. Any contemporary novelist should recognize in Patrick O'Brian a Master of the Art.
Alan Judd
#4. What was independence but a word? What did any form of government matter? Freedom: to do what?
Patrick O'Brian
#6. Of course she will put on a cap,' said Sophie, with a pitying look. 'How could she possibly receive strange gentlemen without a cap? But her hair must be dressed under it.
Patrick O'Brian
#7. Man is a deeply illogical being, and must be ruled illogically. Whatever that frigid prig Bentham may say, there are innumerable motives that have nothing to do with utility.
Patrick O'Brian
#8. Surely man in general is born to be oppressed or solitary, if he is to be fully human;
Patrick O'Brian
#9. 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
#10. Any innocent pleasure is a real good: there are not so many of them.
Patrick O'Brian
#11. Go and see whether the Doctor is about,' said Jack, 'and if he is, ask him to look in, when he has a moment.'
Which he is in the fish-market, turning over some old-fashioned lobsters. No. I tell a lie. That is him, falling down the companion-way and cursing in foreign.
Patrick O'Brian
#12. Nelson once said that love of his country served him for a greatcoat.
Patrick O'Brian
#13. What's wrong with (Captain) Jack Aubrey?"
"Everything, since he has a command and I have not.
Patrick O'Brian
#15. One lives in the very present moment; lives intently. There is no urge to be doing: being is the highest good.
Patrick O'Brian
#16. I have never yet known a man admit that he was either rich or asleep.
Patrick O'Brian
#17. I know of few men over 50 that seem to me entirely human, virtually none who has long exercised authority.
Patrick O'Brian
#18. Other people's marriages are a perpetual source of amazement.
Patrick O'Brian
#19. Since then he has said nothing and although from time to time I have thrown out what I hope were delicate hints and suggestions he has not seemed to notice them; and with a man Lucifer could not hold a book, bell or candle to for pride I cannot raise the subject directly.
Patrick O'Brian
#20. We are always the most violent against those whom we have injured.
Patrick O'Brian
#21. She is remarkably dry,' he said to Stephen who, preferring to die in the open, had crept up on deck,
Patrick O'Brian
#22. 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
#23. Likings arise when one has no earthly reason for liking - the most wildly improbable marriages and uncommon friendship.
Patrick O'Brian
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. I wonder, James, whether it is not too easy for a rich man to despise money
Patrick O'Brian
#29. No man born of woman has ever understood spoken Portuguese.
Patrick O'Brian
#30. I've never set out to seduce my reader. I don't see him at all clearly.
Patrick O'Brian
#31. Clap on with both hands, sir - never say die - one more heave and we're home, safe and dry.
Patrick O'Brian
#32. But you know as well as I, patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country, right or wrong, which is infamous, or my country is always right, which is imbecile.
Patrick O'Brian
#33. 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
#35. The Navy speaks in symbols and you may suit what meaning you choose to the words.
Patrick O'Brian
#36. 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
#37. Lord Nelson's maxim 'Never mind manoeuvres: always go straight at 'em.
Patrick O'Brian
#38. Better than a shove in the eye with a dry stick. [- Jack]
Patrick O'Brian
#39. Looking angrily at the wombat: and a moment later, 'Come now, Stephen, this is coming it pretty high: your brute is eating my hat.'
'So he is, too,' said Dr. Maturin. 'But do not be perturbed, Jack; it will do him no harm, at all. His digestive processes
Patrick O'Brian
#40. (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
#41. There is so much ignorant prejudice against bees in a dining-room.
Patrick O'Brian
#42. 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
#43. I slept as the person in Plutarch that ran from Marathon to Athens without a pause would have slept if he had not fallen dead, the creature.
Patrick O'Brian
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. He had been quite unprepared for this particular blow, striking under every conceivable kind of armour, and for some minutes he could hardly bear the pain, but sat there blinking in the sun. 'Christ,' he said at last. 'Another day.
Patrick O'Brian
#47. You do not mean there is danger of peace?, cried Jack.
Patrick O'Brian
#48. Jack had never been a hypocrite until he became a father, and even now it did not come easy.
Patrick O'Brian
#49. Trollops are capital things in port, but will not do at sea.
Patrick O'Brian
#51. all that wretched schoolmastering.' 'On some it acts like a poison, making them unfit for the society of grown men.
Patrick O'Brian
#52. 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
#53. Puddings, my dear sir?' cried Graham.
Puddings. We trice 'em athwart the starboard gumbrils, when sailing by and large.
Patrick O'Brian
#54. I have never written for an audience. On the other hand I do not write merely to please myself.
Patrick O'Brian
#56. Most men find [peace] entirely unlike what they had expected - like love...
Patrick O'Brian
#57. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#63. 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
#64. A freewheeling mind can conceive a virtually infinite number of sequences, but just how that mind picks out and stores those that may perhaps be used later to deal with a given tension, a given situation, is far beyond my understanding.
Patrick O'Brian
#65. After all a book can be represented as a conversation with one's demon.
Patrick O'Brian
#66. Rested, shaved, coffee'd, steaked, you will be a different man.
Patrick O'Brian
#67. 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
#69. Good only for destruction - has destroyed all that was valuable in the monarchy - is destroying France with daemonic energy - this tawdry, theatrical empire - a deeply vulgar man - nothing French about him - insane ambition - the whole world one squalid tyranny. His infamous treatment of the Pope!
Patrick O'Brian
#70. That would be locking the horse after the stable door is gone, a very foolish thing to do.
Patrick O'Brian
#71. I say these damned things,' Jack went on, musing as they drank their bottle, 'and don't quite understand at the time, though I see people looking black as hell, and frowning, and my friends going "Pst, pst", and then I say to myself, "You're brought by the lee again, Jack.
Patrick O'Brian
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. Let us drink to the renewed success of Irish arms, and confusion to the Pope.
Patrick O'Brian
#75. The function of the novel is the exploration of the human condition. Really, that's what it's all about.
Patrick O'Brian
#76. 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
#77. It is unjust to provoke a man and then to complain he is a satyr if the provocation succeeds. You
Patrick O'Brian
#80. I very much dislike being interviewed by the kind of journalist who tries to dig into your private life.
Patrick O'Brian
#81. 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
#82. Jack and Stephen were neither of them human until the first pot of coffee was down, hot and strong.
Patrick O'Brian
#83. In my case, I write in the past because I'm not really part of the present. I have nothing valid to say about anything current, though I have something to say about what existed then.
Patrick O'Brian
#84. 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
#85. For very strangely his officers looked upon Jack Aubrey as a moral figure, in spite of all proofs of the contrary ...
Patrick O'Brian
#86. How much better a man feels when he is mixed with halibut and leg of mutton and roebuck
Patrick O'Brian
#87. 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
#89. Come athwart my hawse and I shall ride you down, you half-baked son of an Egyptian fart,' to a wool-gathering jolly-boat; and art echoed from either shore.
Patrick O'Brian
#90. Wondering just how Mr Church thought he had deserved anything short of impalement, Stephen walked into the cabin.
Patrick O'Brian
#91. I've come down from the mountains, with an ass-full of specimens...
Patrick O'Brian
#93. men strike out their permanent characters; or have those characters struck into them
Patrick O'Brian
#94. . . . 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
#95. We understood one another better before ever I opened my mouth
Patrick O'Brian
#97. You can't be happy if you're not tolerably happy with yourself. The addition of friends adds immeasurably to life.
Patrick O'Brian
#98. How wonderfully strange,' he thought, 'to be upset by this trifle; yet I am upset.
Patrick O'Brian
#100. 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
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