Moby Quotes

1. "It is no less difficult to write a sentence in a recipe than sentences in Moby Dick. So you might as well write Moby Dick."
Author: Annie Dillard

2. "I told them this novel was an American classic, in many ways the quintessential American novel. There were other contenders: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter. Some cite its subject matter, the American Dream, to justify this distinction. We in ancient countries have our past--we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future."
Author: Azar Nafisi

3. "Then there are actors my age like Ethan Hawke, he's in 'Moby Dick,' I love his work. I've been lucky. Alfred Molina, he has real class."
Author: Billy Boyd

4. "Everyone experiences grace, even if they don't realize it. It's kind of like Moby's music. You could ask your average sixty-something-year-old retired banker in Connecticut if he's ever heard of Moby and/or his music and the response you'd receive more than likely would be a resounding, "No—what's a Moby?" But if you say, "Remember that American Express commercial where Tiger Woods is putting around New York City? Remember the song playing? That was Moby." "Oh, then, OK. I guess I have heard Moby," our theoretical retired banker in New Canaan might say. "So … what exactly is a Moby?" That's like grace. Not that grace is a pretentious vegan techno-rocker, but you get the idea. Grace is everywhere, all around us, all of the time. We only need the ears to hear it and the eyes to see it."
Author: Cathleen Falsani

5. "I think people have the wrong idea of 'Moby Dick' as this somber, boring thing."
Author: Chad Harbach

6. "Reading 'Moby-Dick' was really a sort of transformative literary experience for me."
Author: Chad Harbach

7. "I love Eminem, I love Moby. Why can't we just be friends?"
Author: Chris Kirkpatrick

8. "In school I ended up writing three different papers on "The Castaway" section of Moby-Dick, the chapter where the cabin boy Pip falls overboard and is driven mad by the empty immensity of what he finds himself floating in. And when I teach school now I always teach Crane's horrific "The Open Boat," and get all bent out of shape when the kids find the story dull or jaunty-adventurish: I want them to feel the same marrow-level dread of the oceanic I've always felt, the intuition of the sea as primordial nada, bottomless, depths inhabited by cackling tooth-studded things rising toward you at the rate a feather falls."
Author: David Foster Wallace

9. "She'll probably have all the work made up and a dozen stories written for The Oracle before I finish that one stupid book report on Moby Dick. I mean, Todd, who really cares about whales?'Todd did, but he let the comment slide by."
Author: Francine Pascal

10. "Do you like Moby Dick," he asks."I hate it," she says. "And I don't say that about many things. Teachers assign it, and parents are happy because their kids are reading something of 'quality'. But it's forcing kids to read books like that that make them think they hate reading."
Author: Gabrielle Zevin

11. "Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death. (moby dick chap 29 p123)"
Author: Herman Melville

12. "Now the various species of whales need some sort of popular comprehensive classification, if only an easy outline one for the present, hereafter to be filled in all its departments by subsequent laborers. As no better man advances to take this matter in hand, I hereupon offer my own poor endeavors. I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty. I shall not pretend to a minute anatomical description of the various species, or - in this place at least - to much of any description. My object here is simply to project the draught of a systematization of cetology. I am the architect, not the builder. (moby dick chap 32 p131)"
Author: Herman Melville

13. "I do not know where I can find a better place than just here, to make mention of one or two other things, which to me seem important, as in printed form establishing in all respects the reasonableness of the whole story of the White Whale, more especially the catastrophe. For this is one of those disheartening instances where truth requires full as much bolstering as error. So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory."
Author: Herman Melville

14. "There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner - for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable. (Moby Dick chap 35 p 153)"
Author: Herman Melville

15. "But how? Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever written a book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in his doing nothing particular to prove it. It is moreover declared in his pyramidical silence. (Moby Dick Chapter lxxix p345)"
Author: Herman Melville

16. "There she blows!—there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!"
Author: Herman Melville

17. "I will have no man in my boat," said Starbuck, "who is not afraid of a whale." By this, he seemed to mean, not only that the most reliable and useful courage was that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward. (moby dick chap 26 p112)"
Author: Herman Melville

18. "His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw benieath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab's leg."
Author: Herman Melville

19. "But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope. (Moby Dick; Chap 7 p36)"
Author: Herman Melville

20. "Renee: "You know what I did when I finished Moby Dick?"David: "You harpooned the guy that sold you the book?"
Author: John C. Stipa

21. "Peter held up the book he had been reading: 'Moby-Dick; or, The Whale'."To tell you the truth, I'm not even sure this is English," Peter said. "It's taken me most of today to get through a page."
Author: Justin Cronin

22. "Besides all those whaling details, Moby Dick is about someone who's looking for something so huge, something they've wanted all their life, yet they know when they find it, it will kill them."
Author: Laurie Anderson

23. "Moby Dick - that book is so amazing. I just realized that it starts with two characters meeting in bed; that's how my book begins, too, but I hadn't noticed the parallel before, two characters forced to share a bed, reluctantly."
Author: Michael Chabon

24. "As any student of literature knows, the books that last are often not the books that are most popular when they are written. Both 'Moby Dick' and 'The Great Gatsby' were complete failures, critically and commercially, when they first appeared."
Author: Michael Cunningham

25. "I'd much rather go to a Banksy art show than a Moby art show. My art is painfully naive."
Author: Moby

26. "If you live on Nantucket, you can't avoid its history, and 'Moby Dick' is the way most of us get into Nantucket's history."
Author: Nathaniel Philbrick

27. "Even though I hadn't read a word of it, I grew up hating 'Moby-Dick.'"
Author: Nathaniel Philbrick

28. "For me, 'Moby-Dick' is more than the greatest American novel ever written; it is a metaphysical survival manual - the best guidebook there is for a literate man or woman facing an impenetrable unknown: the future of civilization in this storm-tossed 21st century."
Author: Nathaniel Philbrick

29. "Not to me," I said.Kafka wrote his first story in one night. Stendhal wrote TheCharterhouse of Parma in forty-nine days. Melville wrote Moby-Dick in sixteen months. Flaubert spent five years on MadameBovary. Musil worked for eighteen years on The Man WithoutQualities and died before he could finish. Do we care about anyof that now?"
Author: Paul Auster

30. "My life is littered with copies of Moby Dick."
Author: Peter O'Toole

31. "When we think of the masterpieces that nobody praised and nobody read, back there in the past, we feel an impatient superiority to the readers of the past. If we had been there, we can't help feeling, we'd have known that Moby-Dick was a good book—-why, how could anyone help knowing?But suppose someone says to us, "Well, you're here now: what's our own Moby-Dick? What's the book that, a hundred years from now, everybody will look down on us for not having liked?" What do we say then?"
Author: Randall Jarrell

32. "It's a tiny bestseller, but, officially yes. But, hey, most people haven't read Moby-Dick, so why the hell should they read my book?"
Author: Richard Linklater

33. "Many, many of my paintings have come from the first chapter of Moby Dick."
Author: Robert Indiana

34. "But Moby-Dick is the explanation of America. It's not just a novel. It is a book of prophecy. It is the book. It is the book of America."
Author: Robert Stone

35. "He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench."
Author: Roberto Bolaño

36. "I hate metaphors. That's why my favorite book is Moby Dick. No frou-frou symbolism. Just a good, simple tale about a man who hates an animal."
Author: Ron Swanson

37. "Nenhuma mulher escreveu o Processo, Moby Dick ou os Sete Pilares da Sabedoria. Elas não contestam a condição humana, porque mal começam a assumi-la integralmente. É o que explica porque razão as suas obras carecem de ressonâncias metafísicas e também de humor negro; elas não põem o mundo entre parênteses, não lhe fazem perguntas, não denunciam as contradições: levam-no a sério"
Author: Simone De Beauvoir

38. "I love to read. I was in AP English in high school, and we were assigned books every few months. 'Moby Dick' and 'The Great Gatsby' are two of my favorite ones."
Author: Spencer Boldman

39. "Most action is based on redemption and revenge, and that's a formula. Moby Dick was formula. It's how you get to the conclusion that makes it interesting."
Author: Sylvester Stallone

40. "If you could decide on characters' destinies it would be like going to the desk of a travel agent who says: "So where do you want to find the whale, in Samoa or in the Aleutian Islands? And when? And do you want to be the one who kills it or let Queequeg do it? Whereas the real lesson of Moby-Dick is that the whale goes wherever it wants."
Author: Umberto Eco

41. "When one reads, and re-reads, Moby Dick, it seems to me that one gets a more convincing, a more definite, impression of the man than from anything one may learn of his life and circumstances; an impression of a man endowed by nature with a great gift blighted by an evil genius, so that, like the agave, no sooner had it put forth its splendid blooming than it withered; a moody, unhappy man tormented by instincts he shrank from with horror; a man conscious that the virtue had gone out of him, and embittered by failure and poverty; a man of heart craving for friendship, only to find that friendship too was vanity. Such, as I see him, was Herman Melville, a man whom one can only regard with deep compassion."
Author: W. Somerset Maugham

42. "Optimists are those who go after Moby dick in a row boat with a bucket of tarter sauce."
Author: Zig Ziglar

43. "Confidence is going after Moby Dick in a rowboat and taking the tartar sauce with you."
Author: Zig Ziglar

Moby Quotes Pictures