Peter Nichols > Quotes

“In any age, there is no shortage of people willing to embark on a hazardous adventure. Columbus and Magellan filled eight ships between them for voyages into the void. One hundred and fifty years ago, the possibilities offered by missionary service were limitless and first-rate. Later, Scott and Shackleton turned away droves after filling their crews for their desperate Antarctic voyages. In 1959 ... sailor H.W. Tilman, looking for a crew for a voyage in an old wooden yacht to the Southern Ocean, ran this ad in the London Times: "Hand [man] wanted for long voyage in small boat. No pay, no prospects, not much pleasure." Tilman received more replies than he could investigate, one from as far away as Saigon.”
― Peter Nichols, Evolution's Captain: The Dark Fate of the Man Who Sailed Charles Darwin Around the World

“The likelihood of meeting anyone who wouldn't make him feel even lonelier seemed increasingly remote. Life was a dwindling process now, not a building proposition. He couldn't imagine being with someone new, opening up, feeling appreciated and understood, without having to explain his dubious non sequiturs and increasingly arcane or redundant frame of reference.”
― Peter Nichols, The Rocks

“And the seasons, as now, reliably made everything new again. He liked to remember Goethe’s line: “A man can stand anything but a succession of ordinary days.”
― Peter Nichols, The Rocks

“Donald Crowhurst had an extraordinary talent for making people believe him. His power lay in the fact that he had completely convinced himself.”
― Peter Nichols, A Voyage for Madmen

“One day a Japanese guard came into the 20-year-old Moitessier’s cell intending to kill him. He raised his pistol, but they locked eyes until, inexplicably, the guard lowered the pistol and walked away. Now, years later, tenderized by solitude, Moitessier wished he had spared the rat.”
― Peter Nichols, A Voyage for Madmen

“Once someone loses trust, that’s it, Gerald. It’s gone. It’s broken. You can’t repair it with explanations. You can’t wheedle trust back from someone.”
― Peter Nichols, The Rocks

“So I lowered the sails ... and once I had lowered them there was nothing more I could do except pray. So I prayed. And between times I turned to one of my sailing manuals to see what advice it contained for me. It was like being in hell with instructions.” 50”
― Peter Nichols, A Voyage for Madmen

“When you’re lost in the Wild and you’re scared as a child, And Death looks you bang in the eye, And you’re sore as a boil it’s according to Hoyle To cock your revolver…and die. But the Code of a Man says: “Fight all you can,” And self-dissolution is barred. In hunger and woe, oh, it’s easy to blow… It’s the hell-served-for-breakfast that’s hard.”
― Peter Nichols, A Voyage for Madmen. Peter Nichols

“and male company in Mireille’s neurasthenic”
― Peter Nichols, The Rocks

“The Victress was another design by the pioneering American Arthur Piver, whose reputation hadn’t been hurt too badly by his own disappearance and presumed death at sea aboard one of his own boats in 1968. His boat might have capsized, but it might also have been run down or suffered any of the mishaps sailors always risk when going to sea.”
― Peter Nichols, A Voyage for Madmen

“Dumas’s book, Alone Through the Roaring Forties,”
― Peter Nichols, A Voyage for Madmen

“At the other end of the earth, at the farthest reach of each sailor’s due north, the British transarctic expedition, led by English explorer-author Wally Herbert, was at the same time approaching the North Pole after more than 400 days on the polar ice cap.”
― Peter Nichols, A Voyage for Madmen

“Moitessier very quickly wrote another book, his second, about their voyage, Cap Horn à la voile (titled in English: Cape Horn: The Logical Route), which was published in time for France’s premier boat show, the Salon Nautique. It became a huge best-seller.”
― Peter Nichols, A Voyage for Madmen

“Once Is Enough, Miles Smeeton’s thrilling (and even funny) account of his two separate and disastrous capsizes aboard his yacht Tzu Hang in the Southern Ocean west of Cape Horn.”
― Peter Nichols, A Voyage for Madmen

“With the last sentence Blyth stumbles across the credo of all adventurers, be they sailors, mountaineers, or explorers. The where and how is simply the means to burrow as deeply as posssible into oneself. It’s the answer to the relentless question that floods the mind when the exercise becomes painful and severe: What am I doing here? What’s the point?”
― Peter Nichols, A Voyage for Madmen

“there is no one right way of handling storms at sea. There is only what works for different boats and their captains in different storms, an improvised alchemy of conditions and intuition.”
― Peter Nichols, A Voyage for Madmen

“Yachting has long been ruefully likened to standing in a cold shower while tearing up money.” 42.”
― Peter Nichols, A Voyage for Madmen

“passed through that magical and mysterious looking glass that comes with fame and success, on the far side of which people come to you unbidden and ask if they can give you what you want.”
― Peter Nichols, A Voyage for Madmen

“came to the Bar Formentor”
― Peter Nichols, The Rocks