Quotes About Melville

I can describe my books as I seem them as American, imaginative, symbolic. My literary ancestors are two other Calvinists, Hawthorne, and Melville.

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)

And we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.

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.

Then, at two o'clock in the early morning of February 10, while Melville was still packing his bags

Asked point-blank about Mary's opinion of him, Melville dissembled.

Hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple dumpling.

Lord Melville was an efficient First Lord of the Admiralty, but his past was catching up with him.