Captain Ahab Quotes

“Ahab and aguish lay stretched together in one hammock.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Is, then, the crown too heavy that I wear? … Yet it is bright with many a gem; I, the wearer, see not its far flashings; but darkly feel that I wear that, that dazzling confounds. ’Tis Iron – that I know – not gold.”
― Herman Melville

“Over his ivory-inlaid table, Ahab presided like a mute, maned sea-lion on the white coral beach, surrounded by his warlike but still deferential cubs. In his own proper turn, each officer waited to be served.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“What will the owners say, sir?”

“Let the owners stand on Nantucket beach and outyell the Typhoons. What cares Ahab? Owners, owners? Thou art always prating to me, Starbuck, about those miserly owners, as if the owners were my conscience.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“For a long time, now, the circus-running sun had raced within his fiery ring, and needs no sustenance but what's in himself. So Ahab.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick