Master and Commander (Aubrey & Maturin, #1)

by Patrick O'Brian

To his left lay the merchantmen: scores and, indeed, hundreds of feluccas, tartans, xebecs, pinks, polacres, polacre-settees, houarios and barca-longas – all the Mediterranean rigs and plenty from the northern seas as well – bean-cods, cats, herring-busses.

the man is in the road he cannot leave but must go on, making it deeper and deeper (a groove, or channel), until he is lost in his mere character – persona – no longer human, but an accretion of qualities belonging to this character.

‘Oh, come now! And it would scarcely have been a very honourable stroke, either.’ ‘Perhaps I am no great judge of what is honourable, sir,’ said Dillon. ‘I speak as a mere fighting man.’

‘Yet on the other hand,’ said Lord Keith, ‘you do possess one prime quality in a commander. You are lucky.

In spite of a candid delight in being fine, in putting on his best uniform and his golden epaulette, Jack had never had the least opinion of his looks, and until this moment he had scarcely thought of them for two minutes together. But now, having gazed long and thoughtfully, he said, ‘I suppose I am rather on the hideous side?’ ‘Yes,’ said Stephen. ‘Oh yes. Very much so.’

He derives a greater pleasure from a smaller stream of wit than any man I have ever known.’

Ever since Stephen Maturin had grown rich with their first prize he had constantly laid in great quantities of asafetida, castoreum and other substances, to make his medicines more revolting in taste, smell and texture than any others in the fleet; and he found it answered – his hardy patients knew with their entire beings that they were being physicked.