some recent favorite lines

"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)

"Now to any one not fully acquainted with the ways of the leviathans, it might seem an absurdly hopeless task thus to seek out one solitary creature in the unhooped oceans of this planet. But not so did it seem to Ahab, who knew the sets of all tides and currents; and thereby calculating the driftings of the sperm whale's food; and, also calling to mind the regular, ascertained seasons for hunting him in particular latitudes; could arrive at reasonable surmises, almost approaching to certainties, concerning the timeliest day to be upon this or that ground in search of his prey." (167)

"But there are other instances where this whiteness loses all that accessory and strange glory which invests it in the White Steed and Albatross. What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks the eye...It is that whiteness which invests him...this mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes him more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion. Why should this be so?" (161)

"Oh, boys, don't be sentimental; it's bad for the digestion! Take a tonic, follow me!" (146)

"Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant unconscious reveries is that this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thought, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless sooul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some indiscernible form, seems to him, the embodiment of those elusive thought that only people the soul by continually flitting through it." (136)