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159b9eb
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I am so happy that you saw your epop.
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Patrick O'Brian |
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e900b11
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Well, Killick, I trust you are not rushing into matrimony without due consideration? Matrimony is a very serious thing.' 'Oh no, sir. I considered of it: I considered of it, why, the best part of twenty minutes. There was three to choose on, and this here -' looking fondly at his purchase - 'was the pick of the bunch.
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Patrick O'Brian |
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7d73b25
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Oh well,' said Jack: and then, 'Did you ever meet Bach?' 'Which Bach?' 'London Bach.' 'Not I.' 'I did. He wrote some pieces for my uncle Fisher, and his young man copied them out fair. But they were lost years and years ago, so last time I was in town I went to see whether I could find the originals: the young man has set up on his own, having inherited his master's music-library. We searched through the papers -- such a disorder you would ..
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music
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Patrick O'Brian |
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58c2557
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I do not like to sound discontented neither,' said Pullings, 'nor to crab any ship I belong to; but between you and me, Doctor, between you and me, she is more what we call a floating coffin than a ship.
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ship
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Patrick O'Brian |
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c001443
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The Navy speaks in symbols and you may suit what meaning you choose to the words.
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meaning
naval
navy
symbolism
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Patrick O'Brian |
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c681818
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My dear Miss Lamb,' he cried, taking her free hand, 'I hope I see you well. Quite well?' he said earnestly, meaning 'not too much raped?
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Patrick O'Brian |
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2274cc1
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Since the sheets were half-flown the sails instantly split at the seams, the maintopsail shaking so furiously that the masthead must have gone had not Mowett, the bosun, Bonden, Warley the captain of the maintop and three of his men gone aloft, laid out on the ice-coated yard and cut the sail away close to the reefs. Warley was on the lee yardarm when the footrope gave way under him and he fell, plunging far clear of the side and instantly ..
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will-warley
aubreyad
master-and-commander
the-far-side-of-the-world
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Patrick O'Brian |
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9ba78a5
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It was an operation that Dr. Maturin had carried out at sea before, always in the fullest possible light and therefore on deck, and many of them had seen him do so.
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barret-bonden
jack-aubrey
joe-plaice
aubreyad
master-and-commander
the-far-side-of-the-world
stephen-maturin
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Patrick O'Brian |
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9a152a3
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West was the only officer on the quarterdeck, and it so happened that the party of hands making dolphins and paunch-mats on the forecastle were all Shelmerstonians. West was gaping rather vacantly over the taffrail when he saw an extraordinarily handsome woman ride along the quay, followed by a groom. She dismounted at the height of the ship, gave the groom her reins, and darted straight across the brow and so below. 'Hey there,' he cri..
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Patrick O'Brian |
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0f5780c
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Oh, the odious wench. How I wish I were rid of her. I have always loathed women, from clew to earring; hook, line and sinker; root and branch. I always said this would happen, you remember; I was against it from the start. Damn it for a flibbertigibbet, the hussy.
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Patrick O'Brian |
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66a588a
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Almost ready, sir,' said the sweating, harassed bosun. 'I'm working the cunt-splice myself.' 'Well,' said Jack, hurrying off to where the stern-chaser hung poised above the Sophie's quarter-deck, ready to plunge through her bottom if gravity could but have its way, 'a simple thing like a cunt-splice will not take a man of war's bosun long, I believe.
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nautical-terminology
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Patrick O'Brian |
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a8907af
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It's all along of the unicorn's horn - it's all along of the glorious hand. Huzzay, three times huzzay for the doctor!' Lord, how they cheered their surgeon! It was he who had brought the narwhal's tusk aboard: and the severed hand, the Hand of Glory, was his property: both symbolized (and practically guaranteed) immense good fortune, virility, safety from poison or any disease you chose to name: and both had proved their worth.
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Patrick O'Brian |
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fa11cdd
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He reflected on his hitherto reflection that soldiers and sailors were, upon the whole, quite different creatures. 'And perhaps they are, too: yet perhaps drink, in very large quantities, may make the difference less evident.
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Patrick O'Brian |
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e878dbc
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The sea has receded!' cried Stephen. 'I am amazed.' 'They tell me it does so twice a day in these parts,' said Jack. 'It is technically known as the tide.
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Patrick O'Brian |
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6451df5
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How wonderfully strange,' he thought, 'to be upset by this trifle; yet I am upset.
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stephen-maturin
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Patrick O'Brian |
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bb8257e
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Here he found Stephen looking frowsty and discontented - there was nothing that more thoroughly persuaded Jack of his friend's innocence with regard to Mrs Fielding than this three days' beard, this vile old wig - and Stephen said to him 'If the woman does not issue a more Christian invitation in two minutes, I shall drink that,' - pointing to the gunroom's coffee, weak, insipid, only just luke-warm. 'She has asked us to take chocolate with..
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Patrick O'Brian |
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b0e0ac4
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Another roll like that, and we shall have no masts,' said Pullings, as the remaining crockery, the glasses and the inhabitants of the gun-room all shot over to the lee. 'We'll lose the mizen first, Doctor,' - picking Stephen tenderly out of the wreckage - 'and so we'll be a brig; then we'll lose the foremast, so we'll be a right little old sloop; then we'll lose the main, and we'll be a raft, which is what we ought to have begun as.
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Patrick O'Brian |
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60407ba
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I should send my bees ashore for you, upon my sacred honour.
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friends
sacrifice
friendship
jack-aubrey
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Patrick O'Brian |
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e0204e9
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Puddings, my dear sir?' cried Graham. Puddings. We trice 'em athwart the starboard gumbrils, when sailing by and large.
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humor
maturin
jargon
nautical
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Patrick O'Brian |
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e5cf665
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A foolish German had said that man thought in words. It was totally false; a pernicious doctrine; the thoughts flashed into being in a hundred simultaneous forms, with a thousand associations, and the speaking mind selected one, forming it grossly into the inadequate symbols of words, inadequate because common to disparate situations - admitted to be inadequate for vast regions of expression, since for them there were the parallel languages..
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mind
thinking
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Patrick O'Brian |
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59b4f0e
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Wondering just how Mr Church thought he had deserved anything short of impalement, Stephen walked into the cabin.
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Patrick O'Brian |
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61659d2
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What I meant was that if he could induce others to believe what he said, then for him the statement acquired some degree of truth, a reflection of their belief that it was true; and this reflected truth might grow stronger with time and repetition until it became conviction, indistinguishable from ordinary factual truth, or very nearly so.
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Patrick O'Brian |
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96ee213
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It all gave a pleasant illusion of eternity, this quiet sailing under a perfect sky towards a horizon perpetually five miles ahead, never nearer.
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Patrick O'Brian |
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46e9fed
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Mr Mowett,' called Stephen in the pause while the table was clearing to make room for the pudding, and pudding-wine--in this case Frontignan and Canary--was handing about, 'you were telling me about your publishers.' 'Yes, sir: I was about to say that they were the most hellish procrastinators--' 'Oh how dreadful,' cried Fanny. 'Do they go to--to special houses, or do they ...' 'He means they delay,' said Babbington. 'Oh.
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procrastination
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Patrick O'Brian |
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b79eff9
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all agree that the people are most uncommonly amiable and good-looking, their only faults being cannibalism and unlimited fornication. But neither of these is erected into a religious system, oh no: the divine offerings are invariably swine, the cannibalism being simply a matter of taste or inclination; while the fornication has nothing ceremonial or compulsory about it.
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Patrick O'Brian |
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26e95c0
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Well, I will wear the bees, like Damon and Pythagoras - ho, a mere sixty thousand bees in the cabin don't signify, much.
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friends
friendship
jack-aubrey
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Patrick O'Brian |
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eddcb84
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I slept as the person in Plutarch that ran from Marathon to Athens without a pause would have slept if he had not fallen dead, the creature.
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Patrick O'Brian |
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b87c6d6
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He cannot hold his wine; he has no head for it. Why, on no more than three glasses, for I absolutely poured him out no more, he was on the point of singing Yankee Doodle. Yankee Doodle, in a King's ship, upon my sacred honour!
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Patrick O'Brian |
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2b6e14d
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Perhaps there will be news from home waiting for us there. Lord, how I should love to know how things are going.' 'Oh so should I,' cried Stephen. 'Though it is not yet possible that there should be word of Diana and our daughter. Sometimes when I think of that little soul I grow quite lachrymose.' 'A few months of roaring and bawling and swaddling-clothes will soon cure you of that. You have to be a woman to bear babies.' 'So I have always..
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Patrick O'Brian |
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27420ae
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there is here a striving, avid and worldly civilisation, of course; these huge and eager markets, to this incessant buying and selling, that make that self evident; but I had no conception of the ubiquitous sense of the holy, no notion of how another world can permeate the secular. Filth, stench, disease, "gross superstition" as our people say, extreme poverty, promiscuous universal defecation, do not affect it: nor do they affect my sense ..
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Patrick O'Brian |
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9d21408
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I have often observed that extremely violent noise and activity go with good-fellowship and heightened spirits.
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Patrick O'Brian |
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23bfe66
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He had known it often enough. A delightful child, even a delightful early adolescent, interested in everything, alive,affectionate, would turn into a thick, heavy, stupid brute and never recover: ageing men would become wholly self-centered, indifferent to those who had been their friends, avaricious
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Patrick O'Brian |
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aaac1ad
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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.
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Patrick O'Brian |
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12ff8d0
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But when a man puts on maturity and invulnerability, it seems that he necessarily becomes indifferent to many things that gave him joy.
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Patrick O'Brian |
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77373f1
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But I will tell you another misery that is not to be denied. In the common, natural course of events physicians, surgeons and apothecaries are faced with enormous demands for sympathy: they may come into immediate contact with half a dozen deeply distressing cases in a single day. Those who are not saints are in danger of running out of funds and becoming bankrupt; a state which deprives them of a great deal of their humanity. If the man is..
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Patrick O'Brian |
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d946fea
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He considered old age and its mutilations and wondered what it would do for him: examples presented themselves to his mind, not only of mental decay, physical weakness, gout, stone and rheumatism, but of boastful mendacious garrulity, intense and peevish selfishness; timidity if not cowardice, dirt, concupiscence, avarice.
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Patrick O'Brian |
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1a0e74e
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As it usually happened after an engagement, a heavy sadness was coming down over his spirits. To some degree it was the prodigious contrastbetween two modes of life: in violent hand-to-hand fighting threr was no room for time, reflexion, enmity or even pain unless it was disabling; everything moved with extreme speed, cut and parry with a reflex as fast as a sword-thrust, eyes automatically keeping watch on three or four men within reach, a..
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Patrick O'Brian |
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bc7ecd5
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The author says that when an angry impulse is not immediately expressed, it turns to melancholy.
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depression
bitterness
melancholy
resentment
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Patrick O'Brian |
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ac7a0ad
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But, however, I clapped a stopper over his capers.' Dr Maturin was proud of his nautical expressions: sometimes he got them right, but right or wrong he always brought them out with a slight emphasis of satisfaction, much as others might utter a particularly apt Greek or Latin quotation. 'And brought him up with a round stern,' he added.
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Patrick O'Brian |
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37c1fd1
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I will tell you a thing about women. They are superior to men in this, that they have an unfeigned, objective, candid admiration for good looks in other women - a real pleasure in their beauty. Yours,
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Patrick O'Brian |
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eaefc5a
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there never was a ship that fought well without she was a happy ship.
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Patrick O'Brian |
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632daa6
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You were always grossly obese,' observed Stephen. 'Were you to walk ten miles a day, and eat half what you do in fact devour, with no butcher's meat and no malt liquors, you would be able to play at the hand-ball like a Christian rather than a galvanized manatee, or dugong. Mr Goodridge, how do you so, sir? I hope I see you well.' This to Jack's opponent, a former shipmate, the master of HMS Polychrest and a fine navigator, but one whose ca..
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Patrick O'Brian |
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89fc8ea
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Life is a long disease with only one termination and its last years are appalling: weak, racked by the stone, rheumatismal pains, senses going, friends, family, occupation gone, a man must pray for imbecility or a heart of stone. All under sentence of death, often ignominious, frequently agonizing: and then the unspeakable levity with which the faint chance of happiness is thrown away for some jealousy, tiff, sullenness, private vanity, mis..
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Patrick O'Brian |
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ca5c0df
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If I no longer love Diana,' he wrote, 'what shall I do?' What could he do, with his mainspring, his prime mover gone? He had known that he would love her for ever - to the last syllable of recorded time. He had not sworn it, any more than he had sworn that the sun would rise every morning: it was too certain, too evident: no one swears that he will continue to breathe nor that twice two is four. Indeed, in such a case an oath would imply th..
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Patrick O'Brian |