Thursday, February 21, 2008

My Favorite Lines: Moby Dick

"Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock, here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost"(189). 

"....unconsumed, we were burning; immortal in these jaws of death!"(187).

"He knew, for example, that however magnetic his ascendency did not cover the complete spiritual man any more than mere corporeal superiority involves intellectual mastership; for to the purely spiritual, the intellectual but stands in a sort of corporeal relation"(177).

"....but without an object to color, and therefor a blankness in itself, God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates"(170).

"How it was that they so aboundingly responded to the old man's ire-- by what evil magic their souls were possessed, that at times his hate seemed almost theirs; the White Whale as much their insufferable foe as his; how all this came to be-- what the White Whale was to them, of how to their unconscious understandings, also, in some dim, unsuspected way, he might have seemed the gliding great demon of the seas of life, -- all this to explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go"(158).


1 comment:

S. Sommers said...

the page 189 quote is great. I really like the one you included from 158 too.