Moby Dick quotes
"... Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope."
"Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death.
Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.
Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.
In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me."
Ishmael
"...you were kicked by a great man, and with an ivory leg, Stubb. It's an honour, I consider it an honour.
In old England the greatest lords think it great glory to be slapped by a queen, a made garter-knights of; but, be it YOUR boast, Stubb, that ye were kicked by old Ahab, and made a wise man of."
Flask
"Perhaps they were (whales as scarce as hen's teeth);
or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity;
takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him;
every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it.
In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Crammer's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.
There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship;
by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God.
But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror.
Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever.
Heed it well, ye Pantheists"
Ishmael
"Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death.
Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.
Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.
In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me."
Ishmael
"...you were kicked by a great man, and with an ivory leg, Stubb. It's an honour, I consider it an honour.
In old England the greatest lords think it great glory to be slapped by a queen, a made garter-knights of; but, be it YOUR boast, Stubb, that ye were kicked by old Ahab, and made a wise man of."
Flask
"Perhaps they were (whales as scarce as hen's teeth);
or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity;
takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him;
every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it.
In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Crammer's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.
There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship;
by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God.
But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror.
Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever.
Heed it well, ye Pantheists"
Ishmael