Herman Melville Quote

One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into plac...

one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duelist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six-inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale....

In school I ended up writing three different papers on The Castaway section of Moby-Dick, the chapter where the cabin boy Pip falls overboard and is driven mad by the empty immensity of what he finds...

Shakespeare wrote Moby-Dick, using Melville as a Ouija board.

There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath...

But the reason why the grave-digger made music must have been because there was none in his spade

The heroic and often tragic stories of American whalemen were renowned. They sailed the world’s oceans and brought back tales filled with bravery, perseverance, endurance, and survival. They mutinied,...

They have provided a system which for terse comprehensiveness surpasses Justinian's Pandects and the By-laws of the Chinese Society for the Suppression of Meddling with other People's Business.

But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound.

I don't want truth, Palmer; I want smoke!" Captain Ahearn: Waiting For Willie Pete