Robert Michael Ballantyne Quotes

″ ‘I’m not up to everything, Peterkin, as you’ll find out ere long,’ replied Jack, with a smile; ‘but I have been a great reader of books of travel and adventure all my life, and that has put me up to a good many things that you are, perhaps, not acquainted with.’ ”

“I don’t think much of a club, so I’ll change my plan, too. I don’t think much of a club, so I’ll make me a sling out of this piece of cloth. I used to be very fond of slinging, ever since I read of David slaying Goliath the Philistine, and I was once thought to be expert at it”

“There is a strange and peculiar sensation experienced in recovering from a state of insensibility, which is almost indescribable; a sort of dreamy, confused consciousness; a half-waking half-sleeping condition, accompanied with a feeling of weariness, which, however, is by no means disagreeable.”

″ ‘Meat and drink on the same tree!’ cried Peterkin; ‘washing in the sea, lodging on the ground, -and all for nothing! My dear boys, we’re set up for life; it must be the ancient Paradise, -hurrah!’ ”

″ ‘I neither believe in ghosts nor feel uneasy,’ he replied. ‘I never saw a ghost myself, and I never met with any one who had; and I have generally found that strange and unaccountable things have almost always been accounted for, and found to be quite simple, on close examination.’ ”

“What a joyful thing it is to awaken, on a fresh glorious morning, and find the rising sun staring into your face with dazzling brilliancy! -to see the birds twittering in the bushes, and to hear the murmuring of a rill, or the soft hissing ripples as they fall upon the sea-shore!”

“I’ve seen a lot o’ fellows that were always poring over books, and when they came to try to do anything, they were no better than baboons!”

″ ‘A feathered arrow without a barb,’ said he, ‘is a good weapon, but a barbed arrow without feathers is utterly useless.’ ”

“Roving has always been, and still is, my ruling passion, the joy of the heart, the very sunshine of my existence. In childhood, in boyhood, and in man’s estate, I have been a rover; not a mere rambler among the woody glens and upon the hill-tops of my own native land, but an enthusiastic rover throughout the length and breadth of the wide wide world.”

“Ralph, my dearest child, always remember in the hour of danger to look to your Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. He alone is both able and willing to save your body and your soul.”