Donna

“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

“Wit is the unexpected copulation of ideas.”
― Patrick O'Brian, The Hundred Days

“...looking angrily at the wombat: and a moment later, 'Come now, Stephen, this is coming it pretty high: your brute is eating my hat.'
'So he is, too,' said Dr. Maturin. 'But do not be perturbed, Jack; it will do him no harm, at all. His digestive processes--”
― Patrick O'Brian, The Fortune of War

“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 the rarity of plain disinterested affection among our own kind, once we are adult, alas - when you consider how immensely it enhances daily life and how it enriches a man's past and future, so that he can look backward and forward with complacency - why, it is a pleasure to find it in brute creation.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Treason's Harbour