Quotations from *Moby-Dick; or, The Whale*, 20 of 22
Herman Melville
1819-1891 American

“And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar? But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid greenness; as last year's scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut swaths—Starbuck!”

But blanched to a corpse's hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“There she blows! -- there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Like to some flag-staff rising from the painted hull of an argosy, the tall but shattered pole of a recent lance projected from the white whale's back.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Not Jove, not that great majesty Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

And thus, through the serene tranquillities of the tropical sea, among waves whose hand-clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture, Moby Dick moved on, still withholding from sight the full terrors of his submerged trunk, entirely hiding the wrenched hideousness of his jaw.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“The birds! -- the birds!” cried Tashtego.

In long Indian file, as when herons take wing, the white birds were now all flying towards Ahab's boat; and when within a few yards began fluttering over the water there, wheeling round and round, with joyous, expectant cries. Their vision was keener than man's; Ahab could discover no sign in the sea. But suddenly as he peered down and down into its depths, he profoundly saw a white living spot no bigger than a white weasel, with wonderful celerity uprising, and magnifying as it rose, till it turned, and then there were plainly revealed two long crooked rows of white, glistening teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable bottom. It was Moby Dick's open mouth and scrolled jaw; his vast, shadowed bulk still half blending with the blue of the sea. The glittering mouth yawned beneath the boat like an open-doored marble tomb.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

For so revolvingly appalling was the White Whale's aspect, and so planetarily swift the ever-contracting circles he made, that he seemed horizontally swooping upon them.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Meantime, from the beginning all this had been descried from the ship's mast heads; and squaring her yards, she had borne down upon the scene; and was now so nigh, that Ahab in the water hailed her; -- “Sail on the” -- but that moment a breaking sea dashed on him from Moby Dick, and whelmed him for the time. But struggling out of it again, and chancing to rise on a towering crest, he shouted, -- “Sail on the whale! -- Drive him off!”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Far inland, nameless wails came from him, as desolate sounds from out ravines.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

In an instant's compass, great hearts sometimes condense to one deep pang, the sum total of those shallow pains kindly diffused through feebler men's whole lives.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

To and fro pacing, beneath his slouched hat, at every turn he passed his own wrecked boat, which had been dropped upon the quarter-deck, and lay there reversed; broken bow to shattered stern. At last he paused before it; and as in an already over-clouded sky fresh troops of clouds will sometimes sail across, so over the old man’s face there now stole some such added gloom as this.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“Groan nor laugh should be heard before a wreck.”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“Omen? omen? -- the dictionary! If the gods think to speak outright to man, they will honorably speak outright; not shake their heads, and give an old wives' darkling hint.”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“Ahab stands alone among the millions of the peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors!”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

The ship tore on; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a cannon-ball, missent, becomes a plough-share and turns up the level field.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“Ahab will dam off your blood, as a miller shuts his water-gate upon the stream!”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Ah! how they still strove through that infinite blueness to seek out the thing that might destroy them!
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Moby Dick bodily burst into view! For not by any calm and indolent spoutings; not by the peaceable gush of that mystic fountain in his head, did the White Whale now reveal his vicinity; but by the far more wondrous phenomenon of breaching. Rising with his utmost velocity from the furthest depths, the Sperm Whale thus booms his entire bulk into the pure element of air, and piling up a mountain of dazzling foam, shows his place to the distance of seven miles and more. In those moments, the torn, enraged waves he shakes off, seem his mane; in some cases, this breaching is his act of defiance.

“There she breaches! there she breaches!” was the cry, as in his immeasureable bravadoes the White Whale tossed himself salmon-like to Heaven.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale