Emmeline’s Reviews > Moby-Dick > Status Update

"Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life.

"...we know the sea to be an everlasting terra incognita, so that Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one superficial western one..."

"Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feeling; but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those that we left behind secure, were all the time before us."

"Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a Job's whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals."

"...the Pequod went rolling through the bright Quito spring.... The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, reduant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up--flaked up, with rose-water snow. The starred and stately nights seemed haughty dames in jewelled velvets..."

"Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked withlife, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death."

I intended to continue reading after an accidental two year lapse. But I've decided just to start again instead.