Category: quotation/excerpt

Quotations from Moby Dick 2

Yet Dives himself, he too lives like a Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs, and being a president of a temperance society, he only drinks the tepid tears of orphans.

An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea.

through the lacings of the leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure

what trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire.  He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms.

If I had been downright honest with myself, I would have seen very plainly in my heart that I did but half fancy being committed this way to so long a voyage…But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly tries to cover up his suspicions even for himself.  And much this way it was with me.  I said nothing, and tried to think of nothing.

 

Ishmael and Philosophy – Quotations from Moby Dick

When he goes to sea as a simple sailor, it’s hard at first to take orders.  The transition …requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it…But   what of it?  Who ain’t a slave?…however the old sea-captains may order me about – however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way – either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content.  

Ignorance is the parent of fear.

For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness.  Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.

the rope line threaded through the boat and around the crew carries more of true terror than any other aspect of this dangerous affair… But why say more?  All men live enveloped in whale-lines.  All are born with halters around their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.

lashing a second whale’s head to the other side of the boat…by the counterpoise of both heads, she retained her even keel; though sorely strained, you may well believe.  So, when on one side you hoist in Locke’s head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant’s and you come back again; but in very poor plight.  Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat.  Oh, ye foolish! throw all these thunder-heads overboard, and then you will float light and right.

…we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike.

English whalers…say…when cruising in an empty ship, if you can get nothing better out of the world, get a good dinner out of it, at least.

 

quotations from Moby Dick 1

   a purse is but a rag unless you have something in it

(it) was certainly very coolly done by him, and every one knows that in most people’s estimation, to do anything coolly is to do it genteelly.      re Queequeg’s use of a harpoon at the breakfast table

a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more’s the pity.  So, if any one man…afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, …let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way.

Jonah’s Captain, Shipmates, was one whose discernment detects crime in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless.  In this world, Shipmates, Sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.

(Queequeg’s home island) …is not down in any map; true places never are.

Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth              from Stubb, second-mate

…fabulous rumors naturally grow out of the very body of all surprising events, – as the smitten tree gives birth to its fungi

 

 

Quotation for Today

“The two clocks say different times, but it could be that neither of them is right.  Our clock here”, he continues, pointing to the one above them with his long, slender and refined index finger, “is very late, while that one there measures not so much time as, well, the eternal reality of the exploited, and we to it are as the bough of a tree to the rain that falls upon it: in other words we are helpless.”

from Satantango by Laszlo Krasznahorkia

Moby Dick – Discuss

I met the challenge, I finished reading MD a half hour before Book Group.  In my defense, I was reading in the two weeks available after a long vacation trip.  Everyone in Group finished the novel in similar style except one, and we gave her a pass because she’s working and very pregnant.  Everyone enjoyed the reading experience but there was an occasional struggle.  You can’t make it a quick read no matter how pressed for time.  It really is a most curious novel.  It’s undeniably long, and heavy with facts, and nothing much happens until the final few chapters.  It’s also engrossing, populated with memorable characters, full of striking imagery and language and entertaining digressions into philosophy and political commentary.  This is a book for endless discussion.

Moby Dick continually surprises the reader and defies convention.  Everyone knows the opening, right?  Call me Ishmael is among the most famous of opening lines.  Only it isn’t. There are pages before we read that sentence.  The mock-serious tone is set when we’re given an etymology of ‘whale’ by a late consumptive usher and extracts from literature compiled by a sub-sub librarian.  Only then do we arrive at Chapter One and meet our narrator.  You can say the line opens the story, but attaching this prelude material gives our expectations a little shake out of comfortable convention.

Ishmael is a terrific companion and guide on this journey.  He has many admirable qualities; he’s curious, adventurous, willing to accept people and situations as he finds them.  He is practical, interested in science and facts, and a self-educated independent thinker.  Alone and rolling unattached through life, he is the outsider/observer reporting and commenting on the comedy and grief of life.  I try all things; I achieve what I can.

And he’s so funny!  Why doesn’t anyone comment about how witty Ishmael is?  I loved listening to him talk.Coming to an inn for the night, with anxious grapnels I had sounded my pockets and only brought up a few pieces of silver.   Frightened that night, had not the stranger stood between me and the door, I would have bolted out of it quicker than ever I bolted a dinner.  His philosophical reflections are marvelous and delightful in their unexpectedness.  When Tashtego falls into a sweet spermaceti coffin Ishmael muses How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato’s honey head, and sweetly perished there?

Melville’s writing is richly descriptive.  A face showed a congruent small-pox had in all directions flowed over his face, and left it like the complicated ribbed bed of a torrent, when the rushing waters have been dried up.  Starbuck is a long, earnest man…flesh being as hard as twice baked biscuit…his thinness…merely the condensation of the man.  Moby Dick viewed: the appalling beauty of the vast milky mass, that, lit up by a horizontal spangling sun, shifted and glistened like a living opal in the blue morning sea.  Wonderful language that slows an appreciative reader’s pace like a sea anchor.

I’m trying to imagine where we – Ishmael and I – are as he tells the story of this fated voyage.  Possibly he is sitting alone and writing his recollections for later perusal.  But the narrative has the leisurely discursive quality of conversation and storytelling.  It has the pace of a voyage with long periods of near idleness and of simple repetitive work conducive to reflection or talk.  Perhaps I’m the new hand and he’s filling the days with instruction and tales.  I hope that he’s off the sea and snug in a comfortable sailor’s bar, spinning his tales for a mesmerized audience.

 

 

 

still more on books and reading

(he) did not camp near the soporific letter nor contort himself with a foul translation characteristic of rustics, but by right of victory carried the meaning as if captive into his own language.       St. Jerome on translations by Hilary the Confessor

 

I remember clearly how we read back then.  The whole ecstasy of that youthful reading, it wasn’t reading, but galloping, racing through books.  We sought out the racehorse of action, direct speech, short, muscular expressions.  We hated the ritardandos, the descriptions of nature, who needed them…               Now I feel the need to stop, like an old man winded by climbing up a slope he used to take in three bounds.  The hidden pleasures of slowness.  I love to linger long over some “It was a pleasant May morning, the birds were shouting with song, the dew glowed beneath the sun’s soft rays…”

from The Physics of Sorrow by Georgi Gospodinov    translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel

 

more on books and reading

the act of reading makes it appear to us for the time that we have lived another life – that we have had a miraculous enlargement of experience       Henry James

 

…three aspects of the experience of reading fiction: language, the world, and the extension of our sympathies toward other selves.  

We don’t read ‘in order’ to benefit in this way (experience more reality) from fiction.  We read fiction because it pleases us, moves us, is beautiful, and so on – because it is alive and we are alive.       James Wood

 

Paradoxically, at the same time as being able to be more self-indulgent by escaping into a world where no one can reasonably expect us to do anything, we have the luxury of putting ourselves and our needs, wants, and fears aside for a while; by being more selfish in a book, we become less self-ish.         Ann Morgan