Post Captain Quotes

“I sew his ears on from time to time, sure.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

“I am opposed to authority, that egg of misery and oppression; I am opposed to it largely for what it does to those who exercise it.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

“This short watch that is about to come, or rather these two short watches--why are they called dog watches? Where, heu, heu, is the canine connection?'

Why,' said Stephen, 'it is because they are curtailed of course.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

“They were looking after themselves, living with rigid economy; and there was no greater proof of their friendship than the way their harmony withstood their very grave differences in domestic behaviour. In Jack's opinion Stephen was little better than a slut: his papers, odd bits of dry, garlic'd bread, his razors and small-clothes lay on and about his private table in a miserable squalor; and from the appearance of the grizzled wig that was now acting as a tea-cosy for his milk-saucepan, it was clear that he had breakfasted on marmalade.
Jack took off his coat, covered his waistcoat and breeches with an apron, and carried the dishes into the scullery. 'My plate and saucer will serve again,' said Stephen. 'I have blown upon them. I do wish, Jack,' he cried, 'that you would leave that milk-saucepan alone. It is perfectly clean. What more sanitary, what more wholesome, than scalded milk?”
― Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

“There is so much ignorant prejudice against bees in a dining-room.”
― Patrick o'brian, Post Captain

“Rested, shaved, coffee’d, steaked, you will be a different man.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

“They were furious. Did he not know he might catch cold? Why did he not answer their hail? It was no good his telling them he had not heard; they knew better; he had not got flannel ears--Why had he not waited for them? --What was a boat for? Was this a proper time to go a-swimmin? -- Did he think this was midsummer? Or Lammas? -- He was to see how cold he was, blue an trembling like a fucking jelly -- Would a new-joined ships boy have done such a wicked thing? No, sir, he would not. -- What would the skipper, what would Mr Pullings and Mr Babbington say, when they heard of his capers? -- As God loved them, they had never seen anything so foolish: he might strike them blind, else. -- Where had he left his intellectuals? Aboard the sloop? They dried him with handkerchiefs., dressed him by force, and rowed him quickly back to the Polychrest. He was to go below directly, turn in between blankets--no sheets, mind--with a pint of grog and have a good sweat. he was to go up the side now, like a Christian and nobody would notice. Plaice and Lakey were perhaps the strongest men in the ship, with arms like gorillas; they thrust him aboard and hurried him to his cabin without so much as by your leave, and left him there in the charge of his servant, with recommenations for his present care.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

“Jack and Stephen were neither of them human until the first pot of coffee was down, hot and strong.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

“And she hates being managed - that is not the word I want. What is it, Maturin?'

'Manipulated.'

'Exactly. She is a dutiful girl - a great sense of duty: I think it rather stupid, but there it is - but still she finds the way her mother has been arranging and pushing and managing and angling in all this perfectly odious. You two must have had hogsheads of that grocer's claret forced down your throats. Perfectly odious: and she is obstinate - strong, if you like - under that bread-and-butter way of hers. It will take a great deal to move her; much more than the excitement of a ball.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

“Hatred the only moving force, a petulant unhappy striving - childhood the only happiness, and that unknowing; then the continual battle that cannot ever possibly be won; a losing fight against ill-health - poverty for nearly all. Life is a long disease with only one termination and its last years are appalling: weak, racked by the stone, rheumatismal pains, senses going, friends, family, occupation gone, a man must pray for imbecility or a heart of stone. All under sentence of death, often ignominious,frequently agonizing: and then the unspeakable levity with which the faint chance of happiness is thrown away for some jealousy, tiff, sullenness, private vanity, mistaken sense of honour, that deadly, weak and silly notion.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

“Oh, what is that bird?'

'It is a wheatear. We have seen between two and three hundred since we set out, and I have told you their name twice, nay, three times.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

“Another roll like that, and we shall have no masts,' said Pullings, as the remaining crockery, the glasses and the inhabitants of the gun-room all shot over to the lee. 'We'll lose the mizen first, Doctor,' - picking Stephen tenderly out of the wreckage - 'and so we'll be a brig; then we'll lose the foremast, so we'll be a right little old sloop; then we'll lose the main, and we'll be a raft, which is what we ought to have begun as.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

“Compulsion is the death of friendship.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

“Smell is of all senses by far the most evocative: perhaps because we have no vocabulary for it – nothing but a few poverty-stricken approximations to describe the whole vast complexity of odour – and therefore the scent, unnamed and unnamable, remains pure of association; it cannot be called upon again and again, and blunted, by the use of a word; and so it strikes afresh every time, bringing with it all the circumstances of its first perception.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

“Any innocent pleasure is a real good: there are not so many of them.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

“Well, I will wear the bees, like Damon and Pythagoras – ho, a mere sixty thousand bees in the cabin don't signify, much.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

“I should send my bees ashore for you, upon my sacred honour.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

“A foolish German had said that man thought in words. It was totally false; a pernicious doctrine; the thoughts flashed into being in a hundred simultaneous forms, with a thousand associations, and the speaking mind selected one, forming it grossly into the inadequate symbols of words, inadequate because common to disparate situations - admitted to be inadequate for vast regions of expression, since for them there were the parallel languages of music and painting. Words were not called for in many or indeed most forms of thought: Mozart certainly thought in terms of music. He himself at this moment was thinking in terms of scent.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

“I will tell you a thing about women. They are superior to men in this, that they have an unfeigned, objective, candid admiration for good looks in other women – a real pleasure in their beauty. Yours,”
― Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

“My dear Miss Lamb,’ he cried, taking her free hand, ‘I hope I see you well. Quite well?’ he said earnestly, meaning ‘not too much raped?”
― Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

“Killick,’ he cried, folding and sealing it. ‘That’s for the post. Is the Doctor ready?’
‘Ready and waiting these fourteen minutes,’ said Stephen in a loud, sour voice. ‘What a wretched tedious slow hand you are with a pen, upon my soul. Scratch-scratch, gasp-gasp. You might have written the Iliad in half the time, and a commentary upon it, too.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

“Life is a long disease with only one termination and its last years are appalling: weak, racked by the stone, rheumatismal pains, senses going, friends, family, occupation gone, a man must pray for imbecility or a heart of stone. All under sentence of death, often ignominious, frequently agonizing: and then the unspeakable levity with which the faint chance of happiness is thrown away for some jealousy, tiff, sullenness, private vanity, mistaken sense of honour, that deadly, weak and silly notion.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

“How much better a man feels when he is mixed with halibut and leg of mutton and roebuck”
― Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

“Round she went: the squared main and mizen yards lay parallel with the wind, the topsails shaking. Farther, farther; and now the wind was abaft her beam, and by rights her sternway should have stopped; but it did not; she was still travelling with remarkable speed in the wrong direction. He filled the topsails, gave her weather helm, and still she slid backwards in this insane contradiction of all known principles. For a moment all the certainties of his world quivered - he caught a dumbfounded, appalled glance from the master - and then with a sigh from the masts and stays, the strangest straining groan, the Polychrest's motion passed through a barely perceptible immobility to headway. She brought the wind right aft, then on to her larboard quarter; and hauling out the mizen and trimming all sharp, he set the course, dismissed the watch below, and walked into his cabin, relief flooding into him. The bases of the universe were firm again, the Polychrest was heading straight out into the offing with the wind one point free; the crew had not done very badly, no time worth mentioning had been lost; and with any luck his steward would have brewed a decent pot of coffee.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

“At that time I attached a perhaps undue importance to staying alive, and I became moderately proficient with both the pistol and the small-sword.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

“Diana accepted the bait, spat out the hook with contempt, and hurried away to the stables to consult with Thomas,”
― Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

“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, Post Captain

“Some hours later, in the first grey light, Jack awoke to a faint scratching on the door. His waking mind stated that this was a rat in the bread-room, but his body instantly contradicted it – sleeping or awake his body knew whether it was afloat or not; at no time was it ever unaware of the continual shift and heave of the sea, or of the unnatural stability of the land. He opened his eyes and saw Stephen rise from his guttering candle, open the door, receive a bottle and a folded note. He went back to his table, opened the note, slowly deciphered it, burnt both scraps of paper in the candle flame; without turning round he said, ‘Jack, you are awake, I believe?’ ‘Yes. These last five minutes. A good morning to you, Stephen. Is it going to be hot?’ ‘It is. And a good morning to you, my dear. Listen,’ he said, sinking his voice to no more than a whisper, ‘and do not call out or agitate yourself. Do you hear me now?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘War will be declared tomorrow. Bonaparte is seizing all British subjects.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

“Quick’s the word and sharp’s the action.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

“should very much like to see your excrement.’ ‘You shall, my dear sir, you shall.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain