Hms Ulysses Quotes

...the men of the Ulysses had no need to stand in shame...many had found, or were finding, that the point of no return was not necessarily the edge of the precipice: it could be the bottom of the valley, the beginning of the long climb up the far slope, and when a man had once begun that climb he never looked back to that other side.

Every man is what environment and heredity make him.

To all things an end. To every night a dawn. Even to longest night when dawn never comes, there comes, at last, the dawn.

She was still doing forty knots, driving in under the guns of the enemy, guns at maximum depression, when "A" magazine blew up, blasted off the entire bows in one shattering detonations. For a second, the lightened fo'c'sle reared high into the air" then it plunged down, deep down, into the shoulder of a rolling sea. She plunged down and kept on going down, driving down to the black floor of the Arctic, driven down by the madly spinning screws. The still thundering engines her own executioners.

what would be left of it by that time—would be in the Kola

Nature wanted to show mankind, an irreverent, over-venturesome mankind, just how puny and pitifully helpless a thing mankind really is…

He shivered uncontrollably and turned his back on the driving wind. ‘Anyway, I wish to God I had his job,’ he added feelingly. ‘This is worse than winter in Alberta!

The first criticism I ever read was of my first book, H.M.S. ‘Ulysses.’ It got two whole pages to itself in a now defunct Scottish newspaper, with a drawing of the dust jacket wreathed in flames and the headline ‘Burn this book.’ I had paid the Royal Navy the greatest compliment of which I could conceive: this dolt thought it was an act of denigration.