Quotes from Herman Melville

Why all the living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the rumour of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city.

Who would think that fine ladies and gentlemen should regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale! Yet so it is.

As for Men-of-War, when they chance to meet at sea, they first go through such a string of silly bowings and scrapings, such a ducking of ensigns, that there does not seem to be much right-down hearty good-will and brotherly love about it at all. As

What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks the eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin! It is that whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed by the name he bears.

BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGHANISTAN.

straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!

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!

That mortal man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp, and, like Stubb, eat him by his own light, as you may say; this seems so outlandish a thing that one must needs go a little into the history and philosophy of it.

even the king of terrors, when personified by the evangelist, rides on his pallid horse.

man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.

Usher—threadbare

It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale.—It's the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.—It's a blasted heath.— It's a Hyperborean winter scene.—It's the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture's midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain.

With fairest flowers, Whilst summer lasts, and I live here, Fidele—

Acredito que meu corpo não passa de um abrigo para meu melhor ser. Na verdade, que leve meu corpo quem quiser, pois ele não é quem eu sou.

CHAPTER 64 Stubb's Supper

And concerning all these, is not Possession the whole of the law?

I tell you, the sperm will stand no nonsense.

Ain't one limb enough?

L'inferno è un'idea nata originariamente da un pasticcio di mele mal digerito e da allora perpetuata attraverso le dispepsie ereditarie prodotte dai Ramadan.

The maintenance of secrecy in the matter, the confining all knowledge of it for a time to the place where the homicide occurred, the quarter-deck cabin; in these particulars lurked some resemblance to the policy adopted in those tragedies of the palace which have occurred more than once in the capital founded by Peter the Barbarian.

Oh, boys, don't be sentimental; it's bad for the digestion!

But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself?

Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal's jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal?

A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted.