Quotations from *Moby-Dick; or, The Whale*, 21 of 22
Herman Melville
1819-1891 American

“Aye, breach your last to the sun, Moby Dick!” cried Ahab, “thy hour and thy harpoon are at hand!”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

As if to strike a quick terror into them, by this time being the first assailant himself, Moby Dick had turned, and was now coming for the three crews.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

While yet all three boats were plain as the ship's three masts to his eye; the White Whale churning himself into furious speed, almost in an instant as it were, rushing among the boats with open jaws, and a lashing tail, offered appalling battle on every side; and heedless of the irons darted at him from every boat, seemed only intent on annihilating each separate plank of which those boats were made.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

While the two crews were yet circling in the waters, reaching out after the revolving line-tubs, oars, and other floating furniture, while aslope little Flask bobbed up and down like an empty vial, twitching his legs upwards to escape the dreaded jaws of sharks; and Stubb was lustily singing out for some one to ladle him up; and while the old man's line -- now parting -- admitted of his pulling into the creamy pool to rescue whom he could; -- in that wild simultaneousness of a thousand concreted perils, -- Ahab's yet unstricken boat seemed drawn up towards Heaven by invisible wires, -- as, arrow-like, shooting perpendicularly from the sea, the White Whale dashed his broad forehead against its bottom, and sent it, turning over and over, into the air; till it fell again -- gunwale downwards -- and Ahab and his men struggled out from under it, like seals from a seaside cave.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

He now lay for a moment slowly feeling with his flukes from side to side; and whenever a stray oar, bit of plank, the least chip or crumb of the boats touched his skin, his tail swiftly drew back, and came sideways smiting the sea. But soon, as if satisfied that his work for that time was done, he pushed his pleated forehead through the ocean, and trailing after him the intertangled lines, continued his leeward way at a traveller's methodic pace.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

His ivory leg had been snapped off, leaving but one short sharp splinter.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“Nor white whale, nor man, nor fiend, can so much as graze old Ahab in his own proper and inaccessible being.”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“I'll ten times girdle the unmeasured globe; yea and dive straight through it, but I'll slay him yet!”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“Shall we keep chasing this murderous fish till he swamps the last man? Shall we be dragged by him to the bottom of the sea? Shall we be towed by him to the infernal world?”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled.”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“Oh! how valiantly I seek to drive out of others' hearts what's clinched so fast in mine!”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Still as on the night before, slouched Ahab stood fixed within his scuttle; his hid, heliotrope glance anticipatingly gone backward on its dial; sat due eastward for the earliest sun.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“To think’s audacity.”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“And still this hair is growing now; this moment growing, and heat must breed it; but no, it's like that sort of common grass that will grow anywhere, between the earthy clefts of Greenland ice or in Vesuvius lava. How the wild winds blow it; they whip it about me as the torn shreds of split sails lash the tossed ship they cling to. A vile wind that has no doubt blown ere this through prison corridors and cells, and wards of hospitals, and ventilated them, and now comes blowing hither as innocent as fleeces. Out upon it! -- it's tainted. Were I the wind, I'd blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world. I'd crawl somewhere to a cave, and slink there. And yet, 'tis a noble and heroic thing, the wind! who ever conquered it? In every fight it has the last and bitterest blow. Run tilting at it, and you but run through it. Ha! a coward wind that strikes stark naked men, but will not stand to receive a single blow. Even Ahab is a braver thing -- a nobler thing that that. Would now the wind but had a body; but all the things that most exasperate and outrage mortal man, all these things are bodiless, but only bodiless as objects, not as agents. There's a most special, a most cunning, oh, a most malicious difference! And yet, I say again, and swear it now, that there's something all glorious and gracious in the wind.”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Now being pointed in the reverse direction, the braced ship sailed hard upon the breeze as she rechurned the cream in her own white wake.

“Against the wind he now steers for the open jaw,” murmured Starbuck to himself.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“But let me have one more good round look aloft here at the sea; there's time for that. An old, old sight, and yet somehow so young.”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“By heaven this dead wood has the better of my live flesh every way. I can't compare with it; and I've known some ships made of dead trees outlast the lives of men made of the most vital stuff of vital fathers.”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“Some ships sail from their ports, and ever afterwards are missing, Starbuck!”

“Truth, Sir: saddest truth.”

“Some men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of the flood; -- and I feel now like a billow that's all one crested comb, Starbuck. I am old; -- shake hands with me, man.”

Their hands met; their eyes fastened; Starbuck's tears the glue.

“Oh, my captain, my captain! -- noble heart -- go not -- go not! -- see, it's a brave man that weeps; how great the agony of the persuasion then!”

“Lower away!” -- cried Ahab, tossing the mate's arm from him. “Stand by the crew!”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Scarce had he pushed from the ship, when numbers of sharks, seemingly rising from out the dark waters beneath the hull, maliciously snapped at the blades of the oars, every time they dipped in the water; and in this way accompanied the boat with their bites. It is a thing not uncommonly happening to the whale-boats in those swarming seas; the sharks at times apparently following them in the same prescient way that vultures hover over the banners of marching regiments in the east.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

“Strangest problems of life seem clearing; but clouds sweep between -- Is my journey's end coming? My legs feel faint; like his who has footed it all day. Feel thy heart, -- beats it yet? -- Stir thyself, Starbuck! -- stave it off -- move, move! speak aloud!”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles; then quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged berg of ice, swiftly rising to the surface. A low rumbling sound was heard; a subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths; as bedraggled with trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances, a vast form shot lengthwise, but obliquely from the sea. Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back into the deep.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale