Quotes from Herman Melville

Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it.

Delight,--top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven

Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories.

A short life to them, and a jolly death.

if he is going to live for ever, what good will it do to pitch him overboard—tell me that?" "Give him a good ducking, anyhow.

It was so in the Pequod with the little negro Pippin by nick-name, Pip by abbreviation.

It's only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin.

Lulled into such an opium-like state of listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of the 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.

No, Stubb; you may pound that knot there as much as you please, but you will never pound into me what you were just now saying.

Do I sing? Oh, I'm indifferent enough, sir, for that; but the reason why the grave-digger made music must have been because there was none in his spade, sir.

It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude; on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea.

I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise.