Mike > Mike's Quotes

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”
― H. P. Lovercraft, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories

“Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“Robert Service once said dying is easy, it’s the keeping on living that’s hard, and of course the poet was on the money, as poets usually are when it comes to smugly self-evident affirmations.”
― Laird Barron, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

“Jeremy supposed that a Christmas party full of elementary school professionals might be the worst place in the world. He would drift among them helplessly, like a grizzly bear in a roomful of children, expected not to eat anyone.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, North American Lake Monsters

“Somewhere in the world there must be a cult of divination centered on the interpretation of cranial sutures, but he couldn’t recall any from his Cultural Anthro classes. Papua New Guinea maybe. They were big into cranial curation there.”
― Scott Nicolay, Ana Kai Tangata: Tales of the Outer the Other the Damned and the Doomed

“But at some point you have to just decide that if a bear’s going to eat you, a bear’s going to eat you, and then you go about your day.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, After the People Lights Have Gone Off

“The pleasant thing about fighting with the Spaniards, Mr Ellis,’ said Jack, smiling at his great round eyes and solemn face, ‘is not that they are shy, for they are not, but that they are never, never ready.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander

“Any innocent pleasure is a real good: there are not so many of them.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

“But when a man puts on maturity and invulnerability, it seems that he necessarily becomes indifferent to many things that gave him joy.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

“Until comparatively recently in its history, Maycomb County was so cut off from the rest of the nation that some of its citizens, unaware of the South’s political predilections over the past ninety years, still voted Republican.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“Calm down, Miss.” Alexandra’s voice was cold. “Jean Louise, nobody in Maycomb goes to see Negroes any more, not after what they’ve been doing to us. Besides being shiftless now they look at you sometimes with open insolence, and as far as depending on them goes, why that’s out. “That NAACP’s come down here and filled ’em with poison till it runs out of their ears. It’s simply because we’ve got a strong sheriff that we haven’t had bad trouble in this county so far. You do not realize what is going on. We’ve been good to ’em, we’ve bailed ’em out of jail and out of debt since the beginning of time, we’ve made work for ’em when there was no work, we’ve encouraged ’em to better themselves, they’ve gotten civilized, but my dear—that veneer of civilization’s so thin that a bunch of uppity Yankee Negroes can shatter a hundred years’ progress in five. . . . “No ma’am, after the thanks they’ve given us for looking after ’em, nobody in Maycomb feels much inclined to help ’em when they get in trouble now. All they do is bite the hands that feed ’em. No sir, not any more—they can shift for themselves, now.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“We wondered, sometimes, when your conscience and his would part company, and over what.” Dr. Finch smiled. “Well, we know now. I’m just thankful I was around when the ructions started. Atticus couldn’t talk to you the way I’m talking—” “Why not, sir?” “You wouldn’t have listened to him. You couldn’t have listened. Our gods are remote from us, Jean Louise. They must never descend to human level.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“Stephen looked sharply round, saw the decanter, smelt to the sloth, and cried, ‘Jack, you have debauched my sloth.”
― Patrick O'Brian, HMS Surprise

“Stephen came on deck reflecting with satisfaction upon his sloth, now a parlour-boarder with the Irish Franciscans at Rio, and a secret drinker of the altar-wine.”
― Patrick O'Brian, HMS Surprise

“for Captain Aubrey, as for the rest of brute creation, there were only two kinds of birds, the edible and the inedible.”
― Patrick O'Brian, The Mauritius Command

“On the one hand he derived his notion of himself as a lord from people who have had to cringe these many generations to hold on to the odd patch of land that is their only living; and on the other, though half belonging to them, he has been bred up to despise their religion, their language, their poverty, their manners and traditions. A conquering race, in the place of that conquest, is rarely amiable; the conquerors pay less obviously than the conquered, but perhaps in time they pay even more heavily, in the loss of the humane qualities. Hard, arrogant, profit-seeking adventurers flock to the spoil, and the natives, though outwardly civil, contemplate them with a resentment mingled with contempt, while at the same time respecting the face of conquest – acknowledging their greater strength.”
― Patrick O'Brian, The Mauritius Command

“Good day to you, ma’am,’ said Stephen, opening Mrs Wogan’s door. ‘I believe you may take some air at last. The sky is clear, the sun shines bright with a surprising warmth, and although our poop is now the scene of strange activity, the gangway remains, the windward, or weather gangway, ma’am. And we had best profit by the morning while it lasts.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Desolation Island

“Nonsense,’ said Stephen, ‘it is the most wholesome cabbage I have ever come across in the whole of my career. I hope, Mr Herapath, that you are not going to join in the silly weak womanish unphilosophical mewling and puling about the cabbage. So it is a little yellow in certain lights, so it is a little sharp, so it smells a little strange: so much the better, say I. At least that will stop the insensate Phaeacian hogs from abusing it, as they abuse the brute creation, stuffing themselves with flesh until what little brain they have is drowned in fat. A virtuous esculent! Even its boldest detractors, ready to make the most hellish declarations and to swear through a nine-inch plank that the cabbage makes them fart and rumble, cannot deny that it cured their purpurae. Let them rumble till the heavens shake and resound again; let them fart fire and brimstone, the Gomorrhans, I will not have a single case of scurvy on my hands, the sea-surgeon’s shame, while there is a cabbage to be culled.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Desolation Island

“There is a proverb in Ireland,’ said Stephen, ‘to the effect that there is good to be found even in an Englishman – is minic Gall maith. It is not often used, however.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Desolation Island

“This myth called bravery, which is half-panic, half-lunacy (in my case, all panic), pays for all; in England you can’t be a hero and bad. There’s practically a law against it.”
― George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman

“Two weevils crept from the crumbs. ‘You see those weevils, Stephen?’ said Jack solemnly. ‘I do.’ ‘Which would you choose?’ ‘There is not a scrap of difference. Arcades ambo. They are the same species of curculio, and there is nothing to choose between them.’ ‘But suppose you had to choose?’ ‘Then I should choose the right-hand weevil; it has a perceptible advantage in both length and breadth.’ ‘There I have you,’ cried Jack. ‘You are bit – you are completely dished. Don’t you know that in the Navy you must always choose the lesser of two weevils? Oh ha, ha, ha, ha!”
― Patrick O'Brian, The Fortune of War

“Man is a deeply illogical being, and must be ruled illogically. Whatever that frigid prig Bentham may say, there are innumerable motives that have nothing to do with utility.”
― Patrick O'Brian, The Fortune of War

“It occurred to him that she had spent these last few years entirely among men, seeing no women apart from a few like Louisa Wogan; she spoke rather as men, and somewhat raffish, moneyed, loose-living men, speak when they are alone together. ‘She has forgotten the distinction between what can and what cannot be said,’ he reflected. ‘A few more years of this company, and she would not scruple to fart.”
― Patrick O'Brian, The Fortune of War

“There is more, but James has ceased to listen. In the months since Agnes’ disappearance, his old fear of hellfire has been replaced by another more terrible and pervasive: the fear of the void. Cold Marsh has been abandoned, cursed by God or the Devil both. He is certain of this. He will lose his daughter to death or to marriage, and when the darkness descends to cover his eyes, he will face that black maw alone.”
― Daniel Mills, Revenants

“he observed that it was strange how differently wine took different men – some grew glum and fault-finding, some quarrelsome or tearful; for his part he found it did not affect him at all, except perhaps to make him like people rather more, and to make the world seem a more cheerful place. ‘Not that it could be much more cheerful than it is already,’ he added,”
― Patrick O'Brian, The Surgeon's Mate

“These Danes have always been a very froward people. Do you know, Jack, what they did at Clonmacnois? They burnt it, the thieves, and their queen sat on the high altar mother-naked, uttering oracles in a heathen frenzy. Ota was the strumpet’s name. It is all of a piece: look at Hamlet’s mother. I only wonder her behaviour caused any comment.”
― Patrick O'Brian, The Surgeon's Mate

“The lookout that first sights the cat shall have ten guineas and remission of sins, short of mutiny, sodomy, or damaging the paintwork.”
― Patrick O'Brian, The Surgeon's Mate

“Should I feel better if I were to vomit?’ asked Jagiello. ‘I doubt it,’ said Stephen. ‘It has done nothing for the Colonel.”
― Patrick O'Brian, The Surgeon's Mate

“It is only that I dislike the whole notion of subordination. The corporal lurks in almost every bosom, and each man tends to use authority when he has it, thus destroying his natural relationship with his fellows, a disastrous state of affairs for both sides. Do away with subordination and you do away with tyranny: without subordination we should have no Neros, no Tamerlanes, no Buonapartes.’ ‘Stuff,’ said Jack. ‘Subordination is the natural order: there is subordination in Heaven – Thrones and Dominions take precedence over Powers and Principalities, Archangels and ordinary foremast angels; and so it is in the Navy. You have come to the wrong shop for anarchy, brother.”
― Patrick O'Brian, The Ionian Mission

“They were poor thin little undernourished creatures with only a few blue teeth among them, though young: they had been taken up for combining with others to ask for higher wages and sentenced to transportation; but as they were somewhat less criminal than those who had actually made the demand they were allowed to join the Navy instead.”
― Patrick O'Brian, The Ionian Mission