Quotes About Moby Dick

This outlook, one that said that American history must be the history of nature speaking through men, not of men shaping nature, became the single most powerful force in American intellectual life in the nineteenth century and shaped some of America's greatest works of literature, such as Moby Dick, Leaves of Grass and Walden, as well as generating an American school of philosophy , to be furthered by William James and John Dewey.

Moby Dick is my favorite book —I've been rereading it every year since I was sixteen. 'Call me Ishmael' is the greatest first line in a novel ever written.""I, myself, am not fond of animal stories.

Race is the true protagonist of the American novel. Our most popular classic fictions have known this, from 'Moby Dick' to 'Beloved;' all these books take on race or talk it out, often in other forms; they are less 'horror stories for boys' than ghost stories from a haunted conscience.

Captain Ahab drowned, he reminded himself; it was the trimmer, Ishmael, who survived.

were passed on to later generations in bowdlerized and abridged versions as stories for children. The same happened to Gulliver's Travels and to Moby Dick, to Robinson Crusoe, to—Children appreciate a good story. They don't enquire about symbolism or archetypes, and they never read critics.

It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.

it cannot be much matter of surprise that some whalemen should go still further in their superstitions; declaring Moby Dick not only ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time);

His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw benieath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab's leg.

Those who can think up feminism or structuralism; those who can't apply such insights to Moby Dick or The Cat in the Hat.

Do you like Moby Dick?" he asks. "I hate it," she says. "And I don't say that about many things. Teachers assign it, and parents are happy because their kids are reading something of 'quality.' But it's forcing kids to read books like that that make them think they hate reading.

So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.

Captain Ahab had evinced his customary activity, to call it so; yet now that the creature was dead, some vague dissatisfaction, or impatience, or despair, seemed working in him; as if the sight of that dead body reminded him that Moby Dick was yet to be slain; and though a thousand other whales were brought to his ship, all that would not one jot advance his grand, monomaniac object.

all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.

Una de las extravagantes conjeturas que, en las mentes supersticiosas, ya eran inseparables de la Ballena Blanca, era la idea sobrenatural de que Moby Dick era ubicua: que se la había encontrado en latitudes opuestas al mismo tiempo.

If you live on Nantucket, you can't avoid its history, and 'Moby Dick' is the way most of us get into Nantucket's history.

I love to read. I was in AP English in high school, and we were assigned books every few months. 'Moby Dick' and 'The Great Gatsby' are two of my favorite ones.

High time he had another tutor,' said Larry. 'You leave the house for five minutes and come back and find him disembowelling Moby Dick on the front porch.' 'I'm sure he didn't mean any harm,' said Mother, ' but it was rather silly for him to do it on the veranda.

Every time Elvis sings, he makes a bargain with the devil -- just like Captain Ahab in MOBY DICK!

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.

All sorts of men in one kind of world, you see. Dodge again! here comes Queequeg — all tattooing — looks like the signs of the Zodiac himself.

Is Moby Dick the whale or the man?

Everybody talked about Freud when I lived in New Orleans, but I have never read him. Neither did Shakespeare. I doubt if Melville did either, and I'm sure Moby Dick didn't. (William Faulkner)

the chapters on whaling in MOBY DICK can be omitted by all but the most punishment-loving readers.

Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shores our bed and eats at our own table.