Maeve > Maeve's Quotes

“I felt all the easier; a stone was rolled away from my heart. Besides, all the days I should now live would be as good as the days that Lazarus lived after his resurrection; a supplementary clean gain of so many months or weeks as the case might be. I survived myself; my death and burial were locked up in my chest.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“For this is one of those disheartening instances where truth requires full as much bolstering as error.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“For God's sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man's blood was spilled for it.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“So have I seen Passion and Vanity stamping the living magnanimous earth, but the earth did not alter her tides and her seasons for that.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“There, then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, the Whale

“All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round 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. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“if you gobern de shark in you, why den you be angel; for all angel is not'ing more dan de shark well goberned.”
― Herman Melville

“It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Oh, horrible vultureism of earth! from which not the mightiest whale is free.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“If your banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by mistake sends you poison in your pills, you die. True, you may say that, by exceeding caution, you may possibly escape these and the multitudinous other evil chances of life. But handle Queequeg's monkey-rope heedfully as I would, sometimes he jerked it so, that I came very near sliding overboard. Nor could I possibly forget that, do what I would, I only had the management of one end of it.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“I believe that much of a man's character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul. I rejoice in my spine, as in the firm audacious staff of that flag which I fling half out to the world.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“Not so much thy skill, then, O hunter, as the great necessities that strike the victory to thee!”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living. Oh! happy that the world is such an excellent listener!”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“In man or fish, wriggling is a sign of inferiority.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“...there is a delicacy in it equalled only by the daintiness of the elephant's trunk.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“...there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently guided the way of this fire-ship on the sea. Wrapped, for that interval, in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness, the madness, the ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the fiend shapes before me, capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at last begat kindred visions in my soul, so soon as I began to yield to that unaccountable drowsiness which ever would come over me at a midnight helm.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Never dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp - all others but liars!”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“Book! You lie there; the fact is, you books must know your places. You'll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“What is best let alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“All the trees, with all their laden branches; all the shrubs, and ferns, and grasses; the message-carrying air; all these unceasingly were active.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.”
― Herman Melville

“The day the flesh shapes and the flesh the day shapes.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“There's steel in this man that no one has taken the temper out of...”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“His plan has good points and bad points...as any plan would at this stage. A plan depends as much upon execution as it does upon concept.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“The terrain enforced its own rhythms.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune