Best Quotes from Icebreaker By Horatio Clare by Horatio Clare with Page Numbers

Tomorrow morning my ship comes in.

In the peace I experience one of those leaps of the heart, of love and thrill for the world, a euphoric gratitude for life and travel for which there can be no one word in any tongue.

The brave eat the soup, the timid die of hunger.

Don’t jump before you reach the ditch.

A man comes back from beyond the sea, but not from under the sod.

It is amazing, the effect he has, that he keeps having. It is wonderful.

Perhaps this is really a story about gulfs inside, about inner uproar contained in silence, about the breakable and about that which cannot be broken.

You meet yourself at sea in ships, and your ghosts too.

For months I have been waiting for tomorrow.

In my violently orange coat, warm as a bear’s belly, I am ready for the ice.

‘If the measure of a place is its treatment of the most vulnerable, Finland is a world leader.’

‘Decent lives should not be reserved for the privileged.’

‘It is typical that Finland should be the first country to experiment with [universal basic income].’

‘The democracy of Finnish sauna culture means that you are not refused entry because you have not reserved a place.’

‘They looked future-proofed, those Finns. The fires and famines will not reach them.’

‘This transition time is particular and isolated, as you remember who you are alone and fit yourself around the shape of the missing pieces of you.’

‘The only nation in Europe which does not have a crisis of homelessness, the only one in which homelessness has declined.’

‘Civic-mindedness becomes eccentricity as knots of people stand beside empty roads in the shivering cold.’

‘I longed for the day after tomorrow, and the ice, and the ship.’

‘Finland was sundered in civil war, Reds against Whites, a vicious overspill of the Russian Revolution.’

SNOW! I HAD forgotten the joy of it, the amazement and delight of it, the all-changing miracle of its deepening.

The cold was abrupt and thrilling, like icy hands fishing for your ribs.

Beautiful variables was so pleasing I adopted it as my expedition motto.

If Mannerheim founded Finland’s first century, its second is being built on the back of Nokia.

The brave eat the soup, the timid die of hunger may not be about courage but cookery.

I wondered, if half the year is basically darkness and the other half always light, if you can work on your phone via 5G any time, anywhere, and if there is always somewhere open, then had not the clock lost some of its grip on the psyche?

There seemed a universal absence of rush.

Finland is not allowed any [submarines]. The Paris treaty, 1947.

I had been introduced to Finnish laws (humane) and judges (enlightened).

I stepped out into the early light, having taken a bearing on the spire of the cathedral.

‘Chin on chest and head on to the next disappointment!’

‘The ice is always moving. If you only follow the track it can take you away, and the bay is very shallow.’

‘Distance is only the time it takes for us to cross a floe, to forge through a lead, to break into the next white field.’

‘Sisu is the key. It denotes a gritty, courageous and robust refusal to be beaten.’

‘The rule of thumb in icebreaking is everything changes all the time.’

‘Here are radar screens, computers, throttles, rudder controls, bow thruster and the controls for the ‘bubbler’... The bridge is a full orchestra of technology.’

‘When the waves were the height of the bridge I turned the searchlights off. Enough! I’d rather not see them!’

‘It has no single equivalent in English, but denotes a gritty, courageous and robust refusal to be beaten.’

‘The best is Jansson’s Temptation, fish and onions and potatoes.’

‘What kind of ice is this? This is compacted ice. It’s been broken and frozen together.’

Sometimes I will meet men who do not have much English, who are shy and who have a Finnish reserve which is reputed to out-reserve even the British version.

A Finnish silence is just a question of practice.

How can you hope to share a silence if one of you is eavesdropping on the other?

We are a spaceship submerged under the ghost of a Pliocene sea at an echo-junction of climatic change points.

Perhaps the most significant difference between us and the beings who made the footprints, across those millions of years, is that we know that change is coming.

I envy our ancestors their innocence and their solidarity.

In a few decades there will again be no ice here; Otso’s descendants will be in the high north, defending Arctic oil rigs from fragments of the polar cap.

Was this a game? A ruse? Perhaps it is another echo.

Perhaps we have always made tracks for our charges to follow.

The wind has dropped outside. Otso is as silent as she can be, her ventilation humming.

The sea is ice-white to the horizon.

You feel dizzy, you feel like laughing, you feel like setting off for the horizon.

You want children out here, to run and point, to shout and marvel.

The ice is blue-sheened white.

Without wind or waves the crystals join, becoming a thin sheet called nilas.

To experience the albedo is to stand in a still storm of light and radiation.

It is estimated that the loss of summer sea ice and its albedo in the last forty years has raised global temperatures.

Loss of albedo is the biggest threat to our existence, according to this model.

A sober date for soon was given by the British Met Office in June 2016.

Beneath this approach to our custody of the planet is the tacit understanding that as a race we require disaster before we make dramatic change.

It can be done! Change can come!

The pride is in the doing of the thing.

You can spend your life at sea and never steer the ship.

Only icebreakers can do it.

We are almost always on manual.

The sea tonight lies black-glazed, white reefs of snow-dust lying in waves across the ice.

For all his years at sea, Arvo is still catching up with Ville at the helm.

Come on.

There is a professional solidarity in this company of the night.

They want Swedish hairdresser ice.

‘It just shows you, a small decision on a hot day can send you to north-east Greenland!’

‘Our business relies on details, settings, numbers.’

‘The cold makes you move slowly, think slowly.’

‘There’s a sense of being a strategic asset that matters.’

‘Every building bigger than thirty thousand cubic metres has to have a bomb shelter.’

‘Feeling that we are not quite like other ships is an obvious source of pride.’

‘The movement of huge sheets of ice defeats perception and intuition.’

‘He often called out to the drivers to keep at some distance from each other; and repeatedly warned them to follow the precise track which he pursued.’

‘It takes a slow while before they are satisfied, then all crew withdraw.’

‘They were following their own track back this way, but the ice had moved north, so they went over it.’

You do not introduce a ship by her accidents.

The key is the country’s system of all-inclusive health centres, dreamed up by radical doctors in the 1960s.

It’s obsessive. You want to follow your instincts but that’s very dangerous.

Shit happens and you just try to survive.

You know it’s spring when you start to see the gnomes on deck.

Working up there – blue ice everywhere and a big ship behind – it’s a death trap.

You have to think very quickly what to do.

You feel it long before any instrument will tell you.

Reports of the disaster are grim reading: the details and inferences are almost worse.

The first money you spend after the weeks or months spent making it ought not to be stolen or squandered.

‘Never give them a fixed time. Everything will change and the time never works out.’

‘The strength of nature here, the sea’s rude laws and the rule of the ice make curiosities of nationalism and flags.’

‘There is something heroic in the gaunt scene: how many little industrial outposts on how many anonymous shores are keeping their lights burning tonight?’

‘Caring for it punctures the absurdity of normative ideas about what a life is and should be.’

‘Perhaps Finnish taciturnity is a reaction to the torment of self-definition through the opinions of others.’

‘What is the difference between a Finnish extrovert and a Finnish introvert? The extrovert stares at your shoes when you talk to him.’

‘Isolation shared, being cut off together, seeing your own solitude reflected in another, feeling another’s loneliness like a pang in you, like a dread third force – these are shivering things.’

‘The horizon behind him, Matts seems somewhat weighed down by resolve.’

‘In comparison the sea is so simple, its demands so clear.’

‘To be both is to be a true subversive.’

‘The Finnish sense of humour in a book! Was she pleased?’

‘Oh yes, she likes this very much. It has an ISBN number and it is in the Library of Congress.’

‘Now it is time we go for one small coffee!’

‘If you do not have trust it is better you stay ashore.’

‘Every year I do this job because no one else wants it … things can go wrong, but if they do we fix it! So it doesn’t matter.’

‘I find it interesting. I might slide a bit to the dark side.’

‘I like ships because I like my own time!’

‘It started because I had no idea what to do. I didn’t want to consider studying at uni ... but then there was a ship simulator and it felt right.’

‘We are not ourselves but Otso – independent, mighty, mid-voyage and always operational.’

‘The frost performs its secret ministry.’

‘There are still a lot of Russians buried under the country. And it means sisu of course. Everyone needs sisu now.’

‘The distance between ship and shore is wider in the mind than on the map.’

‘If we start going down get into an immersion suit. That will give you six hours. Otherwise you lose consciousness in about five minutes.’

‘I’ll be the captain of a fleet of kebab trucks in Tampere!’

‘For all that we were bullish, we were grateful for Ostbense. We needed her as much as she needed us.’

‘You can sense the others judging, comparing, willing him to get it right.’

‘Every move demands a countermove.’

‘The moment seems to merit more than satisfied silence.’

‘Now we just have to go back once more and flush that last bit of ice.’

‘Tradition, and good manners.’

‘Think of it as the force that whips you back up.’

‘We have this engineering miracle, you know.’

‘You have to try.’

‘But you have to try.’

‘His anger is a seafarer’s revulsion at malpractice.’

‘To imagine the collusion... is to lose faith in humanity.’

‘The times have changed more than the people.’

‘The story of the Estonia’s sinking is nightmarish, even by the standards of the sea.’

‘Let the doors have failed, you pray.’

‘A touch of judgement, quick feet, a bit of luck, and a thousand-tonne icebreaker becomes a plaything.’

‘The Kalevala strikes me as extraordinarily modern and to my ears is pure music, theme and variations.’

‘You will risk the seas, and yours will be a special loneliness, measured on calendars.’

‘If you only have half a life on land then what a rich and providing half-life this is.’

‘A seafarer like this strikes a bargain with life.’

‘Creation in the Kalevala is a playful delight: the world is made of shards of duck egg; a dead man is reanimated with the help of a bee.’

‘This object of terrible power and desire will salt the sea and nourish Finland instead.’

‘The Sampo’s synthesis of science and magic is the blend of trepidation, wonder and desire.’

‘Much rejoicing, spake as follows: “Thence will come the sprouting seed-grain, the beginning of good fortune.”’

‘There is nothing, no mark or distinction, from which to take a bearing; only ice and mist.’

‘You have to feel it through your arse.’

You must be strong with yourself and wear your bravest face, because ships magnify and transmit moods and there is no way off them.

Everyone feels blues and apprehensions; everyone is vulnerable to a tightening of the spirit.

This is why you make Tem the captain, for his miraculous ability to synthesise and broadcast well-being.

The trick is to see it not as incipient isolation but as a confirmation of solidarity.

What miracles we can achieve in only a hundred years.

I keep moving, keeping the cold and rain on my face.

It’s an issue. Not for me. I don’t mind we have immigrants.

Some ancient dread, like an apprehension of the world’s end.

It is almost as though we are veering close to another darkness in this sub-polar sea.

There is a tickle in the air like a portent of rain.

‘For some reason I am a little bit sad. Happy to be going home but also sad to leave.’

‘It is quite wonderful,’ he says. ‘They are taught maths by a Japanese teacher who speaks no Finnish! So the only language is maths.’

‘The only thing is knowing when he will be free,’ Maja begins.

‘If you ever want to come back, Otso will be waiting.’

‘I do not know when I will be working and when I will be free. I do not have control of the future.’

‘Sometimes you did not ask for help when you should, when anybody should.’

‘There is no question of Reidun and me taking a taxi to the airport, they insist.’

‘Our purpose was destruction, but there was no benefit to us in final victory.’

‘It seems to be harder for humankind to nurse a wounded opponent than to battle one still vigorous.’

‘The discovery that the sea really was made solid gave me a fizzing exhilaration.’