“The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as is own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah’s flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.”
― Moby Dick
― Moby Dick
“Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes. That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves, so far within us, that it remains though all the outer character seem gone; bleeds with keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle of a valor-ruined man.”
― Moby Dick
― Moby Dick
“(Curious in time I stand, noting the efforts of heroes,
Is the deferment long? bitter the slander, poverty, death?
Lies the seed unreck’d for centuries in the ground? lo, to God’s due occasion,
Uprising in the night, it sprouts, it blooms,
And fills the earth with use and beauty.)”
― Passage to India
Is the deferment long? bitter the slander, poverty, death?
Lies the seed unreck’d for centuries in the ground? lo, to God’s due occasion,
Uprising in the night, it sprouts, it blooms,
And fills the earth with use and beauty.)”
― Passage to India
“I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall be complete,
The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her who remains jagged and broken.”
―
The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her who remains jagged and broken.”
―
“Queequeq was a native of Rokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.”
― Moby Dick
― Moby Dick
Carl’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Carl’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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