Quotations from *Moby-Dick; or, The Whale*, 15 of 22
Herman Melville
1819-1891 American

Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books. And the drawing near of Death, which alike levels all, alike impresses all with a last revelation, which only an author from the dead could adequately tell.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Of all mortals, some dying men are the most tyrannical; and certainly, since they will shortly trouble us so little for evermore, the poor fellows ought to be indulged.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

They asked him, then, whether to live or die was a matter of his own sovereign will and pleasure. He answered, certainly. In a word, it was Queequeg's conceit, that if a man made up his mind to live, mere sickness could not kill him: nothing but a whale, or a gale, or some violent, ungovernable, unintelligent destroyer of that sort.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

This tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last. And this thought it must have been which suggested to Ahab that wild exclamation of his, when one morning turning away from surveying poor Queequeg -- “Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods!”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

This mysterious, divine Pacific zones the world's whole bulk about; makes all coasts one bay to it; seems the tide-beating heart of earth.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

With one nostril he unthinkingly snuffed the sugary musk from the Bashee isles (in whose sweet woods mild lovers must be walking), and with the other consciously inhaled the salt breath of the new found sea; that sea in which the hated White Whale must even then be swimming.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

In his very sleep, his ringing cry ran through the vaulted hull, “Stern all! the White Whale spouts thick blood!”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Nevertheless, this old man's was a patient hammer wielded by a patient arm. No murmur, no impatience, no petulence did come from him. Silent, slow, and solemn; bowing over still further his chronically broken back, he toiled away, as if toil were life itself, and the heavy beating of his hammer the heavy beating of his heart. And so it was. -- Most miserable!
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Oh, woe on woe! Oh, Death, why canst thou not sometimes be timely? Hadst thou taken this old blacksmith to thyself ere his full ruin came upon him, then had the young widow had a delicious grief, and her orphans a truly venerable, legendary sire to dream of in their after years; and all of them a care-killing competency. But Death plucked down some virtuous elder brother, on whose whistling daily toil solely hung the responsibilities of some other family, and left the worse than useless old man standing, till the hideous rot of life should make him easier to harvest.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of such men, who still have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide, does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, new-life adventures; and from the hearts of infinite Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them—“Come hither, broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them. Come hither! bury thyself in a life which, to your now equally abhorred and abhorring, landed world, is more oblivious than death. Come hither! put up thy grave-stone, too, within the churchyard, and come hither, till we marry thee!”

Hearkening to these voices, East and West, by early sun-rise, and by fall of eve, the blacksmith's soul responded, Aye, I come! And so Perth went a-whaling.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“Because I am scorched all over, Captain Ahab,” answered Perth, resting for a moment on his hammer; “I am past scorching.”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“In no Paradise myself, I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad.”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“How can’st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can’st not go mad?”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“What wert thou making there?”

“Welding an old pike-head, Sir; there were seams and dents in it.”

“And can’st thou make it all smooth, again, blacksmith, after such hard usage as it had?”

“I think so, Sir.”

“And I suppose thou can’st smoothe almost any seams and dents; never mind how hard the metal, blacksmith?”

“Aye, Sir, I think I can; all seams and dents but one.”

“Look ye here, then,” cried Ahab, passionately advancing, and leaning with both hands on Perth’s shoulders; “look ye here—here—can ye smoothe out a seam like this, blacksmith,” sweeping one hand across his ribbed brows; “if thou could’st, blacksmith, glad enough would I lay my head upon thy anvil, and feel thy heaviest hammer between my eyes. Answer! Can’st thou smoothe this seam?”

“Oh! that is the one, Sir! Said I not all seams and dents but one?”

“Aye, blacksmith, it is the one; aye, man, it is unsmoothable.”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“Yet I fear something, Captain Ahab. Is not this harpoon for the White Whale?”

“For the white fiend!”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale