Previous
Herman Melville Quotes
Next

Such dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand, and here and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a tomb.

Copy Translate
Herman Melville

Herman Melville

Profession: Novelist
Nationality: American

Some suggestions for you :

It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open.

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.

The rest of his toilet was soon achieved, and he proudly marched out of the room, wrapped up in his great pilot monkey jacket, and sporting his harpoon like a marshal's baton.

For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything.

I have sat before the dense coal fire and watched it all aglow, full of its tormented flaming life; and I have seen it wane at last, down, down, to dumbest dust. Old man of oceans! of all this fiery life of thine, what will at length remain but one little heap of ashes!

For what can more partake of the mysterious than an antipathy spontaneous and profound such as is evoked in certain exceptional mortals by the mere aspect of some other mortal, however harmless he may be, if not called forth by this very harmlessness itself?

Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the white curds of the whale's direful wrath into the serene, exasperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal.

There are times when even the most potent governor must wink at transgression, in order to preserve the laws inviolate for the future.

For we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.

Genius is full of trash.

Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.

A high degree of refinement, however, does not seem to subdue our wicked propensities so much after all; and were civilization itself to be estimated by some of its results, it would seem perhaps better for what we call the barbarous part of the world to remain unchanged.

I wonder, Flask, whether the world is anchored anywhere; if she is, she swings with an uncommon long cable, though.

There she blows!—there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!

Show all