Moby Dick Quotes

“I try all things, I achieve what I can.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath...”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“In one word, Queequeg, said I, rather digressively; hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through the hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Well . . . he lets it ruin his life. He gets so obsessed with going after the one thing that hurt him that he loses sight of everything else. He becomes isolated from everyone and everything. Paranoid. He feels like he can't trust anyone around him ever. In the end, he loses everything, even his life. And for what? Total stupidity, if you ask me.”
― Sherrilyn Kenyon, Invincible

“Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant, I act under orders.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Shakespeare wrote Moby-Dick, using Melville as a Ouija board.”
― Ray Bradbury

“In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among the many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all over obliquely crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick array, something like those in the finest Italian line engravings. But these marks do not seem to be impressed upon the isinglass substance above mentioned, but seem to be seen through it, as if they were engraved upon the body itself. Nor is this all. In some instances, to the quick, observant eye, those linear marks, as in a veritable engraving, but afford the ground for far other delineations. These are hieroglyphical; that is, if you call those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word to use in the present connexion. By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale in particular, I was much struck with a plate representing the old Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their out-reaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“It is the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it.”
― Herman Melville

“The heroic and often tragic stories of American whalemen were renowned. They sailed the world’s oceans and brought back tales filled with bravery, perseverance, endurance, and survival. They mutinied, murdered, rioted, deserted, drank, sang, spun yarns, scrimshawed, and recorded their musings and observations in journals and letters. They survived boredom, backbreaking work, tempestuous seas, floggings, pirates, putrid food, and unimaginable cold. Enemies preyed on them in times of war, and competitors envied them in times of peace. Many whalemen died from violent encounters with whales and from terrible miscalculations about the unforgiving nature of nature itself. And through it all, whalemen, those “iron men in wooden boats” created a legacy of dramatic, poignant, and at times horrific stories that can still stir our emotions and animate the most primal part of our imaginations. “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme,” proclaimed Herman Melville, and the epic story of whaling is one of the mightiest themes in American history.”
― Eric Jay Dolin, Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America

“but the reason why the grave-digger made music must have been because there was none in his spade”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“American whale oil lit the world. It was used in the production of soap, textiles, leather, paints, and varnishes, and it lubricated the tools and machines that drove the Industrial Revolution. The baleen cut from the mouths of whales shaped the course of feminine fashion by putting the hoop in hooped skirts and giving form to stomachtightening
and chest-crushing corsets. Spermaceti, the waxy substance from the heads of sperm whales, produced the brightest- and cleanest-burning candles the world has ever known, while ambergris, a byproduct of irritation in a sperm whale’s bowel, gave perfumes great staying power and was worth its weight in gold.”
― Eric Jay Dolin, Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America

“in common life we esteem but meanly and contemptibly a fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably smells of that anointing. In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere. As a general rule, he can't amount to much in his totality.”
― Herman Melville

“And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who offers to ship with the Phædon instead of Bowditch in his head. Beware of such an one, I say: your whales must be seen before they can be killed...”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Pensar é audácia”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“As touching Slave-ships meeting, why, they are in such a prodigious hurry, they run away from each other as soon as possible. And as for Pirates, when they chance to cross each other's cross-bones, the first hail is— "How many skulls?"— the same way that whalers hail— "How many barrels?" And that question once answered, pirates straightway steer apart, for they are infernal villains on both sides, and don't like to see overmuch of each other's villanous likenesses.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“There's no way to stop my singing in this world but to cut my throat. And when that's done, ten to one I sing ye the doxology for a wind-up.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Queequeg no care what god made him shark,' said the savage, agonizingly lifting his hand up and down; "wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god; but de god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin.”
― Herman Melville

“It seemed to me that the two remaining masts almost leaned forward, out of the vertical, so great was the pressure of wind in sails. Nothing broke, nothing tore—so beautiful was our position and so constant the current of air. It made the blood sing in my veins, and I knew I could be a sailor for life, if I chose. Yes, I could gladly wait a lifetime, a full sixteen years more, for such a sensation again. Without our effort, grace moved us forward.”
― Sena Jeter Naslund, Ahab's Wife, or The Star-Gazer

“She was not spouting, but sewing the water with her body,”
― Sena Jeter Naslund, Ahab's Wife, or The Star-Gazer

“Talvez não seja muito dizer que a personagem principal de Moby Dick é, então, não Ahab; não o cachalote albino; não a Natureza, ou o oceano; mas a própria habilidade de se contar bem uma história.”
― Bernardo E. Lopes, O narrador injustiçado

“E este narrador [de Moby Dick] é tão esperto, mas tão esperto, e tão dos bons, mas tão dos bons, que na hora certa ele fará com que você esqueça da presença dele, só para sinalizar, num determinado momento, que ele sempre esteve ali: e que ele é você, um narrador da atribulada, e não menos divertidíssima e bonita, vivência humana.”
― Bernardo E. Lopes, O narrador injustiçado

“Perhaps it is no overstatement to say, therefore, that Moby Dick’s main character is, not Ahab; nor the albino sperm whale; nor Nature, or the ocean; but rather the very ability to conscientiously tell a story well.”
― Bernardo E. Lopes, The underrated narrator: The important role Ishmael plays in Moby Dick

“And [Moby Dick's narrator] is so very smart, so very smart indeed, and so gifted with words, so very gifted, that at the right time he'll make you forget his presence, just to signal, at a certain point, that he was there all the time: and that he is actually you, a narrator to the troubled but no less amusing, and beautiful, human existence.”
― Bernardo E. Lopes, The underrated narrator: The important role Ishmael plays in Moby Dick

“Dear Duncan, You color with me, but why? Most of the time I’m the same
color as the page you are using me on –WHITE. If I didn’t have a black outline, you wouldn’t even know I was THERE! I’m not even used to color SNOW or to fill in empty space between other things. And it leaves me feeling… well… empty. We need to talk. Your empty friend, White Crayon”
― Drew Daywalt, The Day the Crayons Quit

“Dear Duncan, You color with me, but why? Most of the time I’m the same color as the page you are using me on –WHITE. If I didn’t have a black outline, you wouldn’t even know I was THERE! I’m not even used to color SNOW or to fill in empty space between other things. And it leaves me feeling… well… empty. We need to talk. Your empty friend, White Crayon”
― Drew Daywalt, The Day the Crayons Quit

“: In the amazing book Moby Dick by the author Herman Melville, the author recounts his story of being at sea. In the first part of his book, the author, calling himself Ishmael, is in a small sea-side town and he is sharing a bed with a man named Queequeg, and I felt saddest of all when I read the boring chapters that were only descriptions of whales, because I knew that the author was just trying to save us from his own sad story, just for a little while.”
― Samuel D. Hunter, The Whale

“Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride's eye!--Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping cannibal ways. Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick