Billy Budd and Other Tales Quotes

“Their Captain's announcement was listened to by the throng of standing sailors in a dumbness like that of a seated congregation of believers in hell listening to the clergyman's announcement of his Calvinistic text.”
― Herman Melville, Billy Budd and Other Tales

“Slowly he uncovered his face; and the effect was as if the moon emerging from eclipse should reappear with quite another aspect than that which had gone into hiding. The father in him, manifested toward Billy thus far in the scene, was replaced by the military disciplinarian.”
― Herman Melville, Billy Budd and Other Tales

“Can we not convict and yet mitigate the penalty?”
― Herman Melville, Billy Budd and Other Tales

“We proceed under the law of the Mutiny Act. In feature no child can resemble his father more than that Act resembles in spirit the thing from which it derives--War.”
― Herman Melville, Billy Budd and Other Tales

“But in natural justice is nothing but the prisoner's overt act to be considered? How can we adjudge to summary and shameful death a fellow creature innocent before God, and whom we feel to be so?”
― Herman Melville, Billy Budd and Other Tales

“But me they'll lash me in hammock, drop me deep.
Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I'll dream fast asleep.
I feel it stealing now. Sentry, are you there?
Just ease this darbies at the wrist, and roll me over fair,
I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist.”
― Herman Melville, Billy Budd and Other Tales

“Civilization, especially if of the austerer sort, is auspicious to it. It folds itself in the mantle of respectability.”
― Herman Melville, Billy Budd and Other Tales

“Billy ... was little more than a sort of upright barbarian ... as Adam presumably might have been [in Eden].”
― Herman Melville, Billy Budd and Other Tales