Quotes About Melville

Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle

It rolls the mid-most waters of the world, the Indian Ocean and Atlantic being just its arms.

Thought he, it's a wicked world in all meridians; I'll die a pagan.

I think, sir, they have some such mild blue days, even as this, in Nantucket.

I'm demonaic, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that's only calm to comprehend itself!

My own opinion is, that however this one-sided horn may really be used by the Narwhal—however that may be—it would certainly be very convenient to him for a folder in reading pamphlets.

But in gazing at such scenes, it is all in all what mood you are in; if in the Dantean, the devils will occur to you; if in that of Isaiah, the archangels.

Let him be, I say: and Heaven have mercy on us all - Presbyterians and Pagans alike - for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.

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

Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy!

I am one of those unfortunate persons to whom the sight of these animals are, at any time an insufferable annoyance.

For a Khan of the plank, and a king of the sea and a great lord of Leviathans was Ahab.

But indeed, nature herself seemed to have been his vintner, and at his birth charged him so thoroughly with an irritable, brandy-like disposition, that all subsequent potations were needless.

Casi incomprensible es también ese subalterno prekafkiano llamado Bartleby que jamás habla si no es para contestar;

then rapidly shoving it straight out from him, with the fixed bayonet of his pointed finger darted full at the object.

and Heaven have mercy on us all--Presbyterians and Pagans alike-- for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.

Heaven have mercy on us all - Presbyterians and Pagans alike - for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.

Melville brought to the task a sound knowledge of actual whaling, much curious learning in the literature of the subject, and, above all, an imagination which worked with great power upon the facts of his own experience.

This is where Melville is perhaps the most profound in his portrait of Ahab as the demagogue and dictator. In the end, even the fiercest of tyrants is done in, not by his own sad, used-up self, but by his enablers, the so-called professionals, who keep whispering in his ear.

This is where Melville is perhaps the most profound in his portrait of Ahab as the demagogue and dictator. In the end, even the fiercest of tyrants is done in, not by his own sad, used-up self, but by his enablers, the so-called professionals, who keep whispering in his ear. p.105

I know the secrets; I dig Joyce and Proust above Melville and Celine.

Alas, those six unfortunate souls who have made their way through my books know that every one of them is about Emerson and Thoreau and their dark counters, Melville and Emily Dickinson. Try as I might, I can't get their inspirations, their challenges and sentences and wisdom and questions out of my head.

Some dying men are the most tyrannical; and certainly, since they will shortly trouble us so little for evermore, the poor fellows ought to be indulged.

The great nineteenth-century writers — Hawthorne and Melville, Thoreau and Emerson, Twain and James — were skeptics, transcendentalists, and humanists, and not even God knows what Emily Dickinson was.