On Stranger Tides

Yeah, there's some unlikely beasts in the world, and it's best to stay near the ones that you've bought drinks for.

The seas and the weathers are what is; your vessels adapt to them or sink.

Mr. Bird flung his food away and leaped to his feet, glaring around at no one in particular. 'I am not a dog!' he shouted agrily, his gold earrings flashing in the firelight.

Blessed be the soul, and the Lord that keeps it in order; blessed be the day, and the Lord that drives it away.

Shandy looked ahead. Blackbeard, apparently willing to get the explanation later, had picked up his oars and was rowing again. 'May I presume to suggest,' yelled Shandy giddily to Davies, 'that we preoceed the hell out of here with all due haste.' Davies pushed a stray lock of hair back from his forehead and sat down on the rower's thwart. 'My dear fellow consider it done.

As soon as I get a ship that can take to the open seas, I'm going to find and rescue and - if there's any worth in me - marry the only woman in whom I can see both a body and a face, and with whom I need not resign one or the other of my own.

…And unmoored souls may drift on stranger tidesThan those men know of, and be overthrownBy winds that would not even stir a hair…

Por la escalera, hacia la luz del sol, fueron saliendo el cocinero (que, obviamente, había seguido la vieja costumbre de enfrentarse a un desastre en la mar emborrachándose tan rápida y concienzudamente como le fue posible) […]

It’s too bad some of you are old enough to remember the peaceful buccaneer days, because those days are long gone—the summer’s over and empire season is here, and in a few more years it probably won’t be possible anywhere in the Caribbean to just sit in the sun and cook scavenged Spanish livestock over the buccan fires. It’s a new world, right enough, a world for the taking, and we’re the ones who know how to live in it without having to pretend it’s a district of England or France or Spain. All that could hold us back is laziness.

But to be God—which of course meant to have been God all along—he had to justify every event in his past, define every action in terms that made it consistent with godhood…there could no longer be any incidents that were too uncomfortable to remember.

It’s a new world, right enough, a world for the taking, and we’re the ones who know how to live in it without having to pretend it’s a district of England or France or Spain.

Abruptly Shandy realized that the fungus heads had opened their eyes and were talking, in actual languages; the one nearest him was complaining, in French, about how cruel it was that an old woman should be neglected by her children, and one near Davies was using a Scottish dialect to deliver the sort of advice a father would give to a son about to travel to a big city. Shandy stared at it wonderingly when he heard it warn against expressing any opinion on religion or the recent regicide. Regicide? thought Shandy; did someone kill King George during this last month…or could this thing be talking about the murder of James the First a century ago?

Yeah, there’s some unlikely beasts in the world, and it’s best to stay near the ones that you’ve bought drinks for.

Los mares y los climas son lo que son; los navíos solo pueden adaptarse a ellos o hundirse. Jack Shandy

Is stealing stolen property less reprehensible than plain stealing?

There’s a way out of every disaster except your last one.

But maybe it’s better to be an outlaw with purpose than a citizen without.

A man with the right kind of power can be immortal by means of it, if he takes care to live on the sea.

The dead become more powerful as time goes by, you see, boy. What was just an unquiet ghost to your grandfather could be a full-fledged loa to your grandchildren. And I’ve learned to bend ’em, train ’em in certain directions like you would a vine. Farmer plant a seed in the ground and one day have a tree—I put a ghost in a bottle under running water and one day I have a loa.

He found he was implicitly confident of a way out…and his face reddened when he realized that it was an axiom called up from early childhood—the conviction that if he cried hard enough and long enough, someone would take him home.

Hurwood nodded. “We’re not really in Florida now—or not particularly, anyway, not Florida any more than we’re in every other place.

Mais tu as raison. Dès que j’aurai un vaisseau capable de prendre le large, je trouverai, je sauverai et - s’il en est encore temps - j’épouserai la seule femme qui a, pour moi, à la fois un corps et un visage, et avec qui je n’ai pas besoin de renoncer aux miens.

And who is this Maître Carrefour?” “Hm? Oh, that’s our old friend Mate Care-For. Thatch just pronounces it right. It means master of the crossroads. Master of different possibilities, in other words—of chance.

Beth gasped, then whirled and ran back in despair toward the fires, her most basic assumptions about the world shaken for the first time; for she knew beyond hope of rationalization that, though the voice had been Bonnett’s and had come out of his mouth, it had been someone else speaking to her through them.

there appeared one of the randomly floating spheres of phosphorescence that the pirates called spirit balls; it lifted above the wispy surface of the fog and bounced slowly among the cypress branches and the dangling masses of Spanish moss, and then, just as slowly, fell back into the fog-river, and the glow became nebulous and then died out.

The evening breeze was strong and from the sea; the three ships moored offshore were nudged parallel, and the fires on the beach threw sparks away from the setting sun toward the black Florida cypress swamps. In the raised hut the pirates had built on a sandy rise just inland of the fires, Beth Hurwood peered out at the sky and the sea, and filled her lungs with the cool sea air, and prayed that the breeze would hold until dawn.

Une de ses mains, ouverte, se balançait, paume en l’air, paume en bas, dans un curieux geste fataliste. Ça va et ça vient, semblait dire cette main, le bon et le mauvais, la vie et la mort, la joie et l’horreur, il ne faut s’étonner de rien.

C’etait impossible de savoir ci c’ etait le froid ou la faim.

Shandy frowned, and looked past the flickering fire to the jungle. “I won’t insult you by being less than frank. This is a new world, and these pirates live much more intimately with it than the Europeans in Kingston and Cartagena and Port-au-Prince, who try to transplant as much of the Old World as they can. If you believe what’s in the Old Testament you believe some weird things…and you shouldn’t be too quick to dictate what is and isn’t possible.

No. It will eventually manifest itself again, but it won’t be the same personality as before; though at the same time it won’t be a different personality either. ‘Same’ and ‘different’ are far too specific. And it won’t have learned what I want to know. It will simply happen to know it this time. Or, if not this time, it will know it some time. It’s like waiting for two or twelve to come up in a game of dice.