Quotes About Obsession

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules.

Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards home, and for long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary, howling Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad.

Herman Melville

Herman Melville

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.

Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death! 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.

that this pertinacious pursuit of one particular whale

Nor is the history of fanatics half so striking in respect to the measureless self-deception of the fanatic himself, as his measureless power of deceiving and bedevilling so many others.

Herman Melville

What I've dared, I've willed; and what I've willed, I'll do! They think me mad -- Starbuck does; but I'm demoniac, I am madness maddened! - Capt. Ahab.

Ahab was inaccessible. Though nominally included in the census of Christendom

Ahab stands alone among the millions of the peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors

Moby Dick doesn't bite so much as he swallows.

Herman Melville

Prokristapána, za každý galon spáleného velrybího tuku byla pÃ…â"¢ece prolita víc než jedna kapka lidské krve.

Herman Melville

what trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire.

Herman Melville

For a long time, now, the circus-running sun had raced within his fiery ring, and needs no sustenance but what's in himself. So Ahab.

Thinking, thinking—a wheel I cannot stop; pure want of sleep it is that turns it.

Forehead to forehead I meet thee, this third time, Moby Dick!

and for long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary, howling Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad.

By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.

Look at a politician, eighty years old, making a speech to a crowd in the rain. What's driving him? Not ambition. He's been a senator for forty years. He can never be anything more. But by winning this election he can have one more Hit. He'd rather die of pneumonia than risk missing the Hit.