FastSaying

[Babbington] "What did [the Doctor, Stephen] do to you, sir?"

[Captain Aubrey] "Well, I am ashamed to say he took a pistol-ball out of the small of my back. It must have been when I turned to hail for more hands- thank God I did not. At the time I thought it was one of those vile horses that were capering about abaft the wheel."

"Oh, sir, surely a horse would never have fired off a pistol?


Patrick O'Brian

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TAWNI O'DELL Romance and romantic are different. Death, itself, can be romantic. Nature and a destructive snowsto...
R.B. O'BRIEN The robot successfully dismounted the car, proceeding at a slight crouch, and with exaggerated cauti...
MARK O'CONNELL To create one's world in any of the arts takes courage.
GEORGIA O'KEEFFE Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the i...
GEORGIA O'KEEFFE I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way... things I had n...
GEORGIA O'KEEFFE I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I've never let it keep me from doing a si...
GEORGIA O'KEEFFE Don’t tell me my writing is misogynistic or anti-feminist just because I or my heroines like to be...
R.B. O'BRIEN That's the trouble with you preachers," he said. "You've all got too good to believe in anything," a...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR When a man died, there had to be blame. Jimmy Cross understood this. You could blame the war, You co...
TIM O'BRIEN The rocking of the boat by the waves was soothing but unknown. The men on the shore were asleep. Not...
JOSEPH O'NEILL When you steal a people's language, you leave their soul bewildered.
JOHN O'DONOHUE Words, too, have genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity.
TIM O'BRIEN Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When ...
MEGHAN O'ROURKE There was a lot about Kim and J.P. he didn't get.... he was confused by their lack of romance. As a ...
STEWART O'NAN We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate those ...
TIM O'BRIEN It's sad when you learn you're not much of a hero.
TIM O'BRIEN Experience has taught me that what you love, you should love all the harder because someday it will ...
RONAN O'BRIEN A hat should be taken off when greeting a lady, and left off the rest of your life. Nothing looks mo...
P.J. O'ROURKE Rising up into the air, they took to the sky and flew. From west and beyond west, into the wind and ...
PAT O'SHEA You're the fire burning inside of me.
KELVIN O'RALPH I will not be a common man. I will stir the smooth sands of monotony. I do not crave security. I wis...
PETER O'TOOLE I guess relationships are just funny like that. It's impossible to figure out why some work out and ...
JENNY O'CONNELL If you work really hard, and you're kind, amazing things will happen.
CONAN O'BRIEN Lasting healing comes from being curious rather than controlling, from mercy rather than manipulatio...
MARY O'MALLEY What the hell is that?" he asked.
"Magic mushrooms."
"I've always wanted to try those," he...
HEATHER O'NEILL I've always been a pretty good researcher," said Bronwyn modestly.
Oh, so that we sha...
DANIEL O'MALLEY The plates of the continental shelf - the world itself - had shifted, and their first concern was pu...
STEWART O'NAN The weirder you're going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When ...
P.J. O'ROURKE The Universe and Spirit do not understand limitations...PEOPLE invented limitations!
JENNIFER O'NEILL Not only have we not done the good things that God really wants us to do, but in fact, we’ve done ...
ERIN O'RIORDAN Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR By subsidiarity is meant the principle that responsibilities should be devolved to the lowest viable...
DENIS O'BRIEN For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the fles...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR There are some of us who have to pay for our faith every step of the way and who have to work out dr...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR We lost our innocence in the Fall, and our turn to it is through the Redemption which was brought ab...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR Satisfy your demand for reason but always remember that charity is beyond reason, and God can be kno...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.
P.J. O'ROURKE I have been told by the third grade teacher that my daughter Poppet is reading at middle school leve...
P.J. O'ROURKE My father...was a man who understood all dogs thoroughly and treated them like human beings.
FLANN O'BRIEN When all else fails, there's always delusion.
CONAN O'BRIEN You would not want to be responsible for someone else’s happiness, so please do not hold someone e...
JENNIFER O'NEILL The yellow commuter train ran through canal-crossed fields as dull as graph paper. Always one saw ev...
JOSEPH O'NEILL I was always the girl growing up who just wasn’t quite like the rest of them. I liked working hard...
R.B. O'BRIEN You don't know. When I'm out there at night I feel close to my own body, I can feel my blood moving,...
TIM O'BRIEN They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--these wer...
TIM O'BRIEN I was a coward. I went to the war.
TIM O'BRIEN To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing ...
TIM O'BRIEN Linda was nine then, as I was, but we were in love...it had all the shadings and complexities of mat...
TIM O'BRIEN Well, right now I'm not dead. But when I am, it's like...I don't know, I guess it's like bein...
TIM O'BRIEN Together we understood what terror was: you're not human anymore. You're a shadow. You slip out of y...
TIM O'BRIEN It wasn't a question of deceit. Just the opposite; he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn s...
TIM O'BRIEN