Melville Quotes

“Man always craves some monstrous object. And his life has no meaning unless he devotes himself entirely to its pursuit. Often, he needs no fanfare of any kind. He appears to be tucked away, quietly cultivating his garden; but, inwardly, he cast off long ago on the perilous voyage of his dreams.No knows he's gone. For that matter, he looks like he's still here. But he's far away; he haunts forbidden seas. . .He's the kind of man who was born to survey uncommon spaces. Such is the secret of lives whose contours can sometimes seem familiar; often, the secret of our own. Sometimes the rest of us know nothing about it until the very end; the awful whiteness of an inexplicable shipwreck that suddenly garlands the sky with spray and foam. But - and this is true in the majority of cases - all of this takes place over such vast reaches, and with monsters so enormous, that it leaves no trace, no survivors, 'and the great shroud of the sea rolls on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”
― Jean Giono, Melville