Balls Quote by Patrick O'Brian

“And she hates being managed - that is not the word I want. What is it, Maturin?' 'Manipulated.' 'Exactly. She is a dutiful girl - a great sense of duty: I think it rather stupid, but there it is - but still she finds the way her mother has been arranging and pushing and managing and angling in all this perfectly odious. You two must have had hogsheads of that grocer's claret forced down your throats. Perfectly odious: and she is obstinate - strong, if you like - under that bread-and-butter way of hers. It will take a great deal to move her; much more than the excitement of a ball.”

Patrick O'Brian

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More by Patrick O'Brian

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“To tell the truth, sir, I believe I had rather sit in the shelter for a while. The cabbage seems to have turned my inward parts to water.’ 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…

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“Never mind the disappointment. Salt water will wash it away. You will be amazed how unimportant it will seem in a week’s time –…

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“The weather had freshened almost to coldness, for the wind was coming more easterly, from the chilly currents between Tristan and the Cape; the sloth was amazed by the change; it shunned the deck and spent its time below. Jack was in his cabin, pricking the chart with less satisfaction than he could have wished: progress, slow, serious trouble with…

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“Of course I do know it is the French who are so wicked; but there are all these people who keep coming and going…

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My wife and I have spent most of our lives in France, and we are both pretty well bilingual, my wife more purely than…

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“This short watch that is about to come, or rather these two short watches--why are they called dog watches? Where, heu, heu, is the…

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The function of the novel is the exploration of the human condition. Really, that's what it's all about.

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It is a great while since I felt the grind of bone under my saw,' he added, smiling with anticipation.

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Other people's marriages are a perpetual source of amazement.

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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…

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“Yet,'said Maturin, pursuing his own thought, 'there is a quality in dogs, I must confess, rarely to be seen elsewhere and that is affection: I do not mean the violent possessive protective love for their owner but rather that mild, steady attachment to their friends that we see quite often in the best sort of dog. And when you consider…

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Maybe bring in sponge balls to learn the technique and gain that experience of actually challenging for a header.

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It wasn't really touching to be young; it was touching not to be young, because you had less of life left. Touching to be thirty; more touching to be forty; tragic to be fifty; and heartbreaking to be sixty. As to seventy, as to eighty, one would feel as one did during the last dance of a ball, tired but…

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This ball was so crowded that it took me - a trained professional journalist with vast experience in this area - forty five minutes…

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