Benito Cereno Quotes

“But the past is passed; why moralize upon it? Forget it. See, yon bright son has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves.

Because they have no memory . . . because they are not human.”
― Herman Melville, Benito Cereno

“Nature cared not a jot.”
― Herman Melville, Benito Cereno

“The morning was one peculiar to that coast. Everything was mute and calm; everything gray. The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter's mould. The sky seemed a gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors among which they were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms. Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.”
― Herman Melville, Benito Cereno

“This slavery breeds ugly passions in man.”
― Herman Melville, Benito Cereno

“all was eclipsed in sinister muteness”
― Herman Melville, Benito Cereno

“images far swifter than these sentences”
― Herman Melville, Benito Cereno

“His mind swarmed with superstitious suspicions.”
― Herman Melville, Benito Cereno

“the king of kind hearts and polite fellows”
― Herman Melville, Benito Cereno

“But, in fact, his reserve might, in some degree, have proceeded from design. If so, then here was evinced the unhealthy climax of that icy though conscientious policy, more or less adopted by all commanders of large ships, which, except in signal emergencies, obliterates alike the manifestation of sway with every trace of sociality; transforming the man into a block, or rather into a loaded cannon, which, until there is call for thunder, has nothing to say. Viewing”
― Herman Melville, Benito Cereno

“existen determinados temperamentos, en los que el sufrimiento prolongado parece anular todo instinto social de afabilidad como si, por el hecho de estar ellos forzados a vivir de pan negro, consideraran equitativo que toda persona que se les acercase estuviera indirectamente obligada a compartir su suerte mediante algún desprecio o afrenta.”
― Herman Melville, Benito Cereno

“Lascars”
― Herman Melville, Benito Cereno

“wen”
― Herman Melville, Benito Cereno

“Ah, thought he, after good actions one's conscience is never ungrateful, however much so the benefited party may be.”
― Herman Melville, Benito Cereno

“You generalize, Don Benito; and mournfully enough. But the past is passed; why moralize upon it? Forget it. See, yon bright sun has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves.”

“Because they have no memory,” he dejectedly replied; “because they are not human.”
― Herman Melville, Benito Cereno