More Patrick O'Brian

Virtue should always be colmingled with humor.
PATRICK O'BRIAN

And although in many cases these unions proved happy enough, sailors being excellent husbands, often...
PATRICK O'BRIAN

Two weevils crept from the crumbs. 'You see those weevils, Stephen?' said Jack solemnly.

...
PATRICK O'BRIAN

...for very strangely his officers looked upon Jack Aubrey as a moral figure, in spite of all proofs...
PATRICK O'BRIAN

Compulsion is the death of friendship, joy.
PATRICK O'BRIAN

But you know as well as I, patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my c...
PATRICK O'BRIAN I do not like to sound discontented neither,' said Pullings, 'nor to crab any ship I belong to; but ...
PATRICK O'BRIAN The weather had freshened almost to coldness, for the wind was coming more easterly, from the chilly...
PATRICK O'BRIAN The newly-minted captain admits the irony between the gold on his shoulders and the lack of gold in ...
PATRICK O'BRIAN Jack, you've debauched my sloth.
PATRICK O'BRIAN Wit is the unexpected copulation of ideas.
PATRICK O'BRIAN Stephen's heart was big to bursting with the violence of his grief, yet even as he looked distracted...
PATRICK O'BRIAN [Babbington] "What did [the Doctor, Stephen] do to you, sir?"

[Captain Aubrey] "Well, I a...
PATRICK O'BRIAN When you go home
Tell them of us, and say
For your tomorrow,
We gave our today.
PATRICK O'DONNELL [I]ndividual readers may conceivably choose (or be led) to regard a given text as literary in cases ...
PATRICK O'NEILL You have my baccala?" asked Angelina.
"Baccala, that's the salt fish, 'cause God's Word gives a...
BRIAN O'REILLY Angelina wanted to start them off with a soup, one that would contrast nicely with the veal. She dec...
BRIAN O'REILLY She dipped a clean pinkie into the hollandaise in the bowl. It coated her finger like a sheath of ye...
BRIAN O'REILLY Just then, the waiter arrived, wheeling a wooden cart that carried an elaborate silver tray that was...
BRIAN O'REILLY Gia turned on the burner and reached for a saucepan. She lightly crushed two cloves of garlic with t...
BRIAN O'REILLY As he talked, Pepino roughly diced a concasse into a stainless steel bowl, deftly peeling and deseed...
BRIAN O'REILLY Angelina simmered the veal shanks all afternoon in homemade chicken stock and vermouth, with shallot...
BRIAN O'REILLY The red gravy was the starting point- sauce 'tomate' to her mom, the mother sauce. She grabbed a big...
BRIAN O'REILLY The next day, Angelina was tending a fresh pot of red gravy on the stove. She was going to make Veal...
BRIAN O'REILLY When she'd come down to the kitchen after her shower, she'd deliberately left the lights off. She li...
BRIAN O'REILLY She decided to start them off with a Sweet Corn Bisque with Crab "Souffle." The pureed texture of th...
BRIAN O'REILLY Scott, if your life had a face, I would punch it. I would punch your life in the face.
BRIAN LEE O'MALLEY I am one and when I am one I am none, and when I am none I have won.
JULIEANNE O'CONNOR There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive a...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR I suppose we all have our little hiding-hole if the truth was known, but as small as it is, the whol...
FRANK O'CONNOR They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy...
TIM O'BRIEN We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers...
ARTHUR O'SHAUGHNESSY Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I ...
GEORGIA O'KEEFFE One of the tasks of true friendship is to listen compassionately and creatively to the hidden silenc...
JOHN O'DONOHUE In yourself right now is all the place you've got.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR [H]iding how you really feel and trying to make everyone happy doesn't make you nice, it just makes ...
JENNY O'CONNELL Laughter is wine for the soul - laughter soft, or loud and deep, tinged through with seriousness - t...
SEáN O'CASEY The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church t...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Chris...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.
ARTHUR O'SHAUGHNESSY You couldn't relive your life, skipping the awful parts, without losing what made it worthwhile. You...
STEWART O'NAN All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.
SEáN O'CASEY Gabrielle chuckled, her dark eyes twinkling. “So he’s been after you, has he? Poor Etta, pursued...
MICHELLE O'LEARY She paused and saw him tense in expectation. He wouldn’t like to hear this, but better from her th...
MICHELLE O'LEARY I’m not bipolar, I’ve just had a bipolar life foisted upon me.
DANIEL O'MALLEY That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the tr...
TIM O'BRIEN Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR Each of us is an artist of our days; the greater our integrity and awareness, the more original and ...
JOHN O'DONOHUE They are all innocent until proven guilty. But not me. I am a liar until I am proven honest.
LOUISE O'NEILL I found him perhaps the least terrifying man I've ever met in the theater—because at first glance ...
PETER O'TOOLE Happiness arises from getting what you want, and this comes and goes. Joy arises from being with wha...
MARY O'MALLEY It's not the face, but the expressions on it. It's not the voice but the things you say. It's not th...
IAN O'SHEA You couldn’t relive your life, skipping the awful parts, without losing what made it worthwhile. Y...
STEWART O'NAN They should."

"Should be like a wood bee," she said.

It was a private joke, a ...
STEWART O'NAN The happiest she'd ever been was with him, and the saddest. Was that the true test of love?
STEWART O'NAN Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't s...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people's in such a const...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR You never loved me, Farin. You never even said you liked me very much.
HEATHER O'BRIEN People give you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn't want to give you Halloween cand...
HEATHER O'NEILL Everybody wants to save the Earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.
P.J. O'ROURKE Don't stand unmoving outside the door of a crying baby whose only desire is to touch you. Go to your...
PEGGY O'MARA Marry for love. But also choose to marry a man or woman who you love that treats you with the ultima...
JULIEANNE O'CONNOR There will be a time when love is beautiful and passionate and nothing else will exist but you and t...
JULIEANNE O'CONNOR Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are ...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR Once the soul awakens, the search begins and you can never go back. From then on, you are inflamed w...
JOHN O'DONOHUE [I suspect] that in the drive toward the liberal universalist notion of human rights that characteri...
DARREN O'DONNELL All the possibilities of your human destiny are asleep in your soul. You are here to realize and hon...
JOHN O'DONOHUE If you are different from the rest of the flock, they bite you
VINCENT O'SULLIVAN I guess we're really brothers, aren't we? Don't know what that means, except it means that some of t...
TIM O'BRIEN We do not need to grieve for the dead. Why should we grieve for them? They are now in a place where ...
JOHN O'DONOHUE To love without ownership, to love with total trust and faith in that very love, to love with the sa...
JULIEANNE O'CONNOR My feeling on the subject of sex with a man is - don't give it up unless you're willing to give him ...
JULIEANNE O'CONNOR Life is surreal. When you step back and really take a look at it, the irony is absolute.
JULIEANNE O'CONNOR Ladies, you have a ton of power if you just understand the fundamental differences between men and w...
JULIEANNE O'CONNOR When it was dark, you always carried the sun in your hand for me.
SEáN O'CASEY Well, I'm not sure where this puts me, Sire. I mean, at least with the others I know what's expected...
AMIE O'BRIEN You cannot borrow half of who you are from someone else, yet people try to do it all of the time, th...
JENNIFER O'NEILL For Equilibrium, a Blessing:
Like the joy of the sea coming home to shore,
May the relief ...
JOHN O'DONOHUE Sometimes, when people speak, I cease listening to their words and zoom in instead on the cadence, a...
ROSIE O'DONNELL Moderation, we find, is an extremely difficult thing to get in this country.
FLANN O'BRIEN In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.
EDNA O'BRIEN It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a seagull or ...
EUGENE O'NEILL It could be a meeting on the street, or a party or a lecture, or just a simple, banal introduction, ...
JOHN O'DONOHUE The world rests in the night. Trees, mountains, fields, and faces are released from the prison of sh...
JOHN O'DONOHUE Your noble friend will not accept pretension but will gently and very firmly confront you with your ...
JOHN O'DONOHUE The ego is the false self-born out of fear and defensiveness.
JOHN O'DONOHUE If you try to view yourself through the lenses that others offer you, all you will see are distortio...
JOHN O'DONOHUE Love allows understanding to dawn, and understanding is precious. Where you are understood, you are ...
JOHN O'DONOHUE We do not need to go out and find love; rather, we need to be still and let love discover us.
JOHN O'DONOHUE Beauty is the illumination of your soul.
JOHN O'DONOHUE Real friendship or love is not manufactured or achieved by an act of will or intention. Friendship i...
JOHN O'DONOHUE When love awakens in your life, in the night of your heart, it is like the dawn breaking within you....
JOHN O'DONOHUE No one else has access to the world you carry around within yourself; you are its custodian and entr...
JOHN O'DONOHUE Your beloved and your friends were once strangers. Somehow at a particular time, they came from the ...
JOHN O'DONOHUE Your soul knows the geography of your destiny. Your soul alone has the map of your future, therefore...
JOHN O'DONOHUE If you send out goodness from yourself, or if you share that which is happy or good within you, it w...
JOHN O'DONOHUE Every friendship travels at sometime through the black valley of despair. This tests every aspect of...
JOHN O'DONOHUE All you can ever achieve is a sense of your soul. You gain little glimpses of its light, colors, and...
JOHN O'DONOHUE You are as young as you feel. If you begin to feel the warmth of your soul, there will be a youthful...
JOHN O'DONOHUE Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world waits.
JOHN O'DONOHUE You are like nobody since I love you"
-Pablo Neruda

This art of love discloses the ...
JOHN O'DONOHUE Real intimacy is a sacred experience. It never exposes its secret trust and belonging to the voyeuri...
JOHN O'DONOHUE If you try to avoid or remove the awkward quality, it will pursue you. The only effective way to sti...
JOHN O'DONOHUE The heart is the inner face of your life. The human journey strives to make this inner face beautifu...
JOHN O'DONOHUE It is lovely to meet an old person whose face is deeply lined, a face that has been deeply inhabited...
JOHN O'DONOHUE Inspiration is always a surprising visitor.
JOHN O'DONOHUE you can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care...
TIM O'BRIEN It’s a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn’t felt it, but the presence of death and dange...
TIM O'BRIEN ...his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe...
TIM O'BRIEN But this too is true: stories can save us.
TIM O'BRIEN They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of th...
TIM O'BRIEN The wait is long, my dream of you does not end.
NUALA O'FAOLAIN There is the solitude of suffering, when you go through darkness that is lonely, intense, and terrib...
JOHN O'DONOHUE I’d begun to think of the Immortality Bus as the Entropy Bus, and of ourselves as trundling across...
MARK O'CONNELL It's not enough to be nice in life. You've got to have nerve.
GEORGIA O'KEEFFE Darkness is drawn to light, but light does not know it; light must absorb the darkness and therefore...
EDNA O'BRIEN I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to t...
P.J. O'ROURKE Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless ...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR I write to discover what I know.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I s...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR My body is not my own any more. They have stamped their names all over it.
LOUISE O'NEILL The beauty that emerges from woundedness is a beauty infused with feeling; a beauty different from t...
JOHN O'DONOHUE Then Dad started going on about the complex geological formations in this part of the coast until Mu...
KERRIE O'CONNOR Having a Coke with You

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biar...
FRANK O'HARA Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay....
FLANNERY O'CONNOR She had a vision of the two of them trapped on a tiny raft surrounded by miles of open water. It wou...
STEWART O'NAN I would not hurt you, little man,' he said.

'I think that I got the disorder in Mullingar...
FLANN O'BRIEN Fame stole my yellow. Yellow is the color you get when you're real and brutally honest. Yellow is wi...
ROSIE O'DONNELL Grace changes us and change is painful".
FLANNERY O'CONNOR The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a ...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR There's a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is t...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR Your criticism sounds to me as if you have read too many critical books and are too smart in an arti...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR She would've been a good woman," said The Misfit, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every ...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR I am so far from being a pessimist...on the contrary, in spite of my scars, I am tickled to death at...
EUGENE O'NEILL I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.
FRANK O'HARA Stand up, be counted. We have the numbers.
BILL O'REILLY Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those ...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR People spot a big black lens, and they worry about what they're doing, or how their hair looks. Nobo...
ERICA O'ROURKE I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite...
GEORGIA O'KEEFFE The sins of the Midwest: flatness, emptiness, a necessary acceptance of the familiar. Where is the r...
STEWART O'NAN The city was a puzzle box built of symbols, a confusion of old and new, armored cars and donkeys in ...
STEWART O'NAN That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers w...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR She hated her job the same way I hated my jobs because she knew she was worth more, but she also hat...
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

We understood one another better before ever I opened my mouth

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Patrick O'Brian

We understood one another better before ever I opened my mouth

Patrick O'Brian

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