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Book: HMS Surprise
Quotes of Book: HMS Surprise

Patrick O'Brian _ HMS Surprise
Surely man in general is born to be oppressed or solitary, if he is to be fully human;
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Patrick O'Brian _ HMS 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.
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Patrick O'Brian _ HMS 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
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Patrick O'Brian _ HMS Surprise
nunc et in hora mortis nostrae,
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Patrick O'Brian _ HMS 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
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Patrick O'Brian _ HMS 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.
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Patrick O'Brian _ HMS Surprise
Stephen looked sharply round, saw the decanter, smelt to the sloth, and cried, 'Jack, you have debauched my sloth.
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Patrick O'Brian _ HMS 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.
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Patrick O'Brian _ HMS Surprise
Good heavens,' cried Mr White. 'To fire great iron balls at people you have never even spoken to – barbarity is come again.
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Patrick O'Brian _ HMS 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.
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Patrick O'Brian _ HMS 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.
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Patrick O'Brian _ HMS 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.
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