Quotes About Obsession

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

Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee.

Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli! deliriously howled Ahab, as the malignant iron scorchingly devoured the baptismal blood.

Ahab and aguish lay stretched together in one hammock.

Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearthstone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no; stay on board, on board!- lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with the far away home I see in that eye!

To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.

The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating them, till they are left living with half a heart and half a lung.

All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; 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.

I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him.

Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air!

Hast seen the white whale?

then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul.

as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastedly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul.

Reality outran apprehension; Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck.

And had you watched Ahab's face that night, you would have thought that in him also two different things were warring. While his one live leg made lively echoes along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap. On life and death this old man walked.

Ah, God! what trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms.

To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order.

one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duelist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six-inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab.

Herman Melville

Twelve years ago, when I was on the Pine Ridge Reservation for 'Thunderheart,' I was dong research into Native American horses that had come into extinction. I was tracing certain Lakota bloodlines, and it became an obsession.

I didn't really discover yakuza films until about five or six years ago.

Years and years ago, I was obsessed with these Pamela Love necklaces, and they had a claw, like an eagle claw, which was silver. Then I found one on this random website. I thought it was a fake claw, and when it arrived, it was a real one, cut off from the animal! It came to my house, and it was disgusting; it was a chicken claw or something.

What happens with 'Mad Men,' it's like an Elvis Costello album; I'll watch it, and then I immediately have to watch it again. AMC will play it back-to-back. I have a tendency to yell at it when my wife's not around because if she catches me yelling at 'Mad Men,' then it gets weird.

My guilty pleasure is competitive cooking reality shows. I don't like cooking shows when it's just about cooking. It has to be competitive - they're fighting and yelling at each other. I am obsessed with those shows, and I have no idea why.