22 Quotes About Moby-dick

Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare's? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of Herschel's great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of hearing? Not at all.-Why then do you try to 'enlarge' your mind? Subtilize it.

Within the drama the Promethean Ahab challenges the laws of creation and dares to steal divine thunder in order to shape it to his ends, subordinating passive Ishmael to his will. But Ishmael alone has escaped to tell the tale and in that telling is the author of a new creation, subordinating Ahab to his purpose.

Well . . . he lets it ruin his life. He gets so obsessed with going after the one thing that hurt him that he loses sight of everything else. He becomes isolated from everyone and everything. Paranoid. He feels like he can't trust anyone around him ever. In the end, he loses everything, even his life. And for what? Total stupidity, if you ask me.

When we think of the masterpieces that nobody praised and nobody read, back there in the past, we feel an impatient superiority to the readers of the past. If we had been there, we can’t help feeling, we’d have known that Moby-Dick was a good book—-why, how could anyone help knowing?But suppose someone says to us, “Well, you’re here now: what’s our own Moby-Dick? What’s the book that, a hundred years from now, everybody will look down on us for not having liked?” What do we say then?

Melville died in New York on September 28, 1891, blissfully unaware that, in the years to come, so many people would leave the hyphen out of 'Moby-Dick.

You know you’re in a tough place in your life when you decide now’s a good time to start Moby Dick.

It is as if James Joyce, for his sins, had been forced to grow up in Queens; as if Sam Beckett had been mugged by Godot in a Flushing comfort station; as if Sid Caesar played the part of Moby Dick in a Roman Polanski movie shot underwater in Long Island City; as if Martin Heidegger has gone into vaudeville...Mr. Mano is Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson and Henderson the Rain King.

Moby Dick, the Great White Whale, tore off Ahab's leg at the knee, when Ahab was attacking him. Quite right, too. Should have torn off both his legs, and a lot more besides.

There is mystery in everything,” Herman whispered, almost to himself. “And so there is poetry in everything. Even something as monstrous as a whale. But how to unlock its poetry.