What's wrong with (Captain) Jack Aubrey?""Everything, since he has a command and I have not.

The Navy speaks in symbols and you may suit what meaning you choose to the words.

Most men find [peace] entirely unlike what they had expected - like love...

The author says that when an angry impulse is not immediately expressed, it turns to melancholy.

The newly-minted captain is told to let nothing stop him but to do nothing that would risk his ship or his crew.

The newly-minted captain admits the irony between the gold on his shoulders and the lack of gold in his pockets.

No problem. Just drop it back off before you go, " he says, procuring a brass key. "And if he puts on Bowie's early stuff and starts sweet-talking, dammit, you run. You run as fast as you can.

God has a plan and a predetermined place on earth and in the Kingdom of God for every one of us

The reason most people are bad is because they do not try to be good." L. Frank Baum, The Emerald City of Oz, 1910

Defensive strategy never has produced ultimate victory.

I looked for a very long time, knowing that it had to happen, but it took me a long time to find someone with the same background and whatnot and I finally found him

I think we're going in the right direction.

In the process of making anything, a person moves beyond personal expression to make something that stands by itself. The work acquires its own internal validity, its own integrity.

Anyone determined to find another person or group inferior can always find whole lists of grounds that demonstrate inferiority because we are all inferior to the ideals of humanness we have erected.

Each of us is tied, in some fashion, to the past. We are all part of a continuum.

There is the extreme of hopelessness and the inevitability of doom, a deep despair that comes from the sense that our industrial, consuming society is jeopardizing the planet.