The Surgeon's Mate Quotes
"But the thousands and thousands of redcoats and civilians were delighted too, and young Mr Wallis, in command of the Shannon, could scarcely be heard when he gave the order to clew up."
"Their deeply-respected captain lay between life and death in his cabin; they had buried their first lieutenant and twenty-two of their shipmates."
"A bloody business, Mr Wallis, a cruel business: but worth it. Yes, by God, it was worth it."
"Fifteen minutes, by God! That I did not know."
"You have done very well indeed, Mr Wallis, you and your shipmates."
"All I ask is that they should welcome their heroes at a decent distance from the Goat."
"Now the burden was gone: the Royal Navy had won; the universe was restored to its true foundations."
"I could not bear reptiles, nor spiders: they made me feel quite ill."
"There is a Latin tag you are no doubt familiar with, to the effect that men are usually seen to believe what they wish to believe."
"We are fallible creatures, Jack, and adepts at self-deception."
"I believe you are aware that I am myself a bastard: I speak with full knowledge when I say that it is a cruel, cruel thing to entail upon a child."
"No spirits. Strait-lacing too is to be avoided, and tobacco."
"It seems that these schooners were lying on the course we were expected to take."
"But he shall never have them, not as long as there is breath in my body."
"For you gentlemen in the glory-line it is quite different: you are answerable to King George, whereas I am answerable to Mrs Dalgleish."
"A good woman is a - there is something in the Bible I don't quite recall, but it hits the nail on the head, as you might put it."
"The mails and dispatches are sacred: particularly this blessed dispatch about the victory."
"She will never be happy until I am as fat as the Durham ox."
"But love is a creature of time, whereas friendship is not."
"Perhaps it is that which makes your novel or tale a little tedious."
"I know very little of women, sir. You cannot make friends with them: they are the Yews of the world."
"You cannot make friends with Jews. They have been beaten and spitted on so long they are the enemy, like the Laconical helots; and women have been domestical helots for oh so much longer."
"There is no friendship between enemies, even in a truce; they are always watching."
"Ah, Dr Maturin, if I could find an Amazon, one of a tribe of women that never have been oppressed, one that I could be friends with, equal friends, oh how I should love her!"
"Alas, my dear, men destroyed the last Amazon two thousand years ago; and I fear your heart must go virgin to the grave."
"If only we could win the King over on to our side, that would deal the French a very heavy blow, perhaps even a fatal blow."
"The supreme military argument was superior force, physical force, and in many services, not only the French, this led to the use of torture."
"Courage was far from constant in any man and extreme agony could reduce him to a shrieking, spiritually dominated animal, willing in some cases to make any concession whatever for a moment's relief."
"He doubted that he could bring himself to it, whatever the extremity."
"Stephen had been waiting for this with mounting impatience."
"If men were to consider what they were at - if they were to look about them, and reflect upon the cost of life in a universe where prisons, brothels, madhouses, and regiments of men armed and trained to kill other men are so very common - why, I doubt we should see many of these poor mewling little larval victims, so often a present misery to their parents and a future menace to their kind."
"But even so he was unwilling to leave it in the infinite squalor of a torture-room, among the vile excitement of the operators and the flood of hatred."
"Stephen instantly realized that this must have come from a French agent in the Brazilian port to which the Constitution had taken them, a man who had seen his coded documents and who had evidently taken him for the Java's surgeon: an understandable confusion, since he berthed with Fox and their captured dunnage had been jumbled together."
"Stephen had no opinion whatsoever of Stephen as a man of his hands and not much more of Jagiello: landsmen seemed born inept and in addition to that Stephen was given to dreaming, to building hypotheses rather than destroying the Temple, and indeed he dropped their only nail down through the slabs into the moat below; while Jagiello was too volatile to accomplish much."
"Stephen was by no means as strongly attached to life as he had been in the days of Port Mahon, when apart from his political activities his whole heart was taken up with Diana; but even so he was unwilling to leave it in the infinite squalor of a torture-room, among the vile excitement of the operators and the flood of hatred - for torturers were obliged in self-justification to hate their victim and obviously the hatred was returned."