The North Water Quotes
"His ship leaves at first light, but before then there is something that must be done."
"I'll buy ye a drink myself, if ye just shut the fuck up."
"I've been whoring all night and the whistle's dry."
"I could cut ye fucking nose off too and feed it to the fucking porkers out back."
"You are a skiving cunt, and a damned liar, and I want you gone."
"If it ever goes silent then he will know that he is finally dead, that some other fucker has finally killed him, and that will be that."
"You can stick that shillelagh up your fucking arse."
"I'm the fucker, me. I'm never the one that's fucked."
"The body has its tedious patterns, its regularities: the feeding, the cleaning, the emptying of the bowels."
"A man has to live, another hour, another minute even."
"If he gets killed, we'll have to make up some tale."
"The boy's dead. The boy was always fucking dead."
"Whatsoever I done with my fellow men I never had no accusations or complaints concerning that."
"There are a thousand nooks and crannies on a ship like this one."
"You will be expected to testify in the court, no doubt, when McKendrick comes to trial."
"I hear that if all goes well, you will be next."
"Baxter thinks the whaling trade is finished."
"These seas are still crammed full of fishes."
"If you’re really no one, I don’t suppose you’ll object too much to this."
"There int too terribly much to know," he says. "You int as complicated as you think. But what little there is to know, I’d say I know it well enough."
"One thing happens, then another comes after it. Why is the first thing more important than the second? Why is the second more important than the third? Tell me that."
"Them’s just words. If they hang me, they will hang me ’cause they can, and ’cause they wish to do it. They will be following their own inclination as I follow mine."
"We’re all sinners, right enough, but some sins are punished harder than others."
"He is down in the hold chained to the mainmast, bound hand and foot. He cannot escape. Set your mind at rest."
"Den I hope you brought your swimming togs along widje, Paddy," he says. "’Cause it’s an awful long focking way to anywhere else from hereabouts."
"You hant got nothing on me, Henry," he says. "So don’t ever think you do."
"If it’s not McKendrick who killed the boy, it’s most likely Henry Drax. He’s lying about the carpenter to save himself."
"We’re not in danger anymore. Set your mind at ease and forget the fucking dream."
"All night, triple-layered in wool, flannel, and oil skin, clustered together like the victims of a sudden massacre, men shudder and spasm and jolt themselves awake."
""Happily they would," he says. "Heathenish fuckers such as them int burdened with the Christian virtues as men like us are."
"He makes a distended, monster face and claws the air to illustrate his meaning."
""I’ve eaten worse in my day," he says. "Plenty worse.""
"He wishes to pray, to speak, to make himself known somehow."
"They are like cattle, he thinks, lying together in a cattle shed."
"It is as if the end of the world has already happened, he thinks, as if he is the only man left alive on the frigid earth."
"I’ll do all I can in these conditions, but we’ll need a large amount of luck."
"You do your best," the priest says, "and I expect the Lord will take care of the remainder."
"Show me a man who hasn’t [made mistakes], and I will show you a saint or a great liar."
"I don’t believe you’ll murder me in my own house," he says. "I don’t believe you have the balls to do such a thing."
"You’re a tough old fucker, you are," Sumner says to himself.
"There are two murderers and two victims. The crime solves itself, and I am free of Henry Drax at last, free of his threats and his gouging, and free of his mad stench."
"Mine is a merchant ship. I’m sorry. We have no space for passengers."
"He knows too much, and what he doesn’t know he can piece together easy enough."
"It’s the future that matters now, not the past."