Master & Commander, chapter 7

One of those human perception things he's so good at:

Do you not find it happens very often, that you are as gay as Garrick at dinner and then by supper-time you wonder why God made the world?

—James Dillon

HMS Surprise, chapter 5

Patrick O'Brian's books are not plot-driven. Even the most 'character-driven' story I've read is nowhere near this character-driven. There are many smaller stories within, overlapping, intertwining (not like C.S. Forester's seperate short stories about Horatio Hornblower) and sometimes hardly any things happen, but the characters are riveting. All of them.