Top 100 Quotes About Ishmael
#1. The great lesson I get from 'Moby-Dick' is that when the times are bad, when there is great foreboding, there are still ways to go about living. It's through Ishmael that I find a kind of overall cosmic approach to a meaningful life in this meaningless world.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#2. Shred my beard and call me Ishmael!" the captain shouted. He
Lisa McMann
#3. If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant's face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale's brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can.
Herman Melville
#4. Arts and disciplines of that kind are fundamentally selfish; they're all designed to benefit the pupil - not the world - "Ishmael
Daniel Quinn
#5. I have been trying to think clearly about everything and to use all this distance to advantage. And here is what I've discovered. I don't love you, Ishmael.
David Guterson
#6. There were guys who prayed at Tarawa,' said Ishmael. 'They still got killed, Mother. Just like the guys who didn't pray. It didn't matter either way.
David Guterson
#7. Well, and keep in mind where those Masonic Mysteries came from in the first place. (Check out Ishmael Reed. He knows more about it than you'll ever find here.)
Thomas Pynchon
#8. Ishmael had the posture of a classic general; the intellect of a cab driver.
Jarrett McCall
#9. David Simon goes to the Jewish Weekly and said he's made all this money, but he can't enjoy it because of criticism by people like Ishmael Reed.
Ishmael Reed
#10. Often we feel the need to say that a book isn't just about a particular time or place but is about the human spirit. People say this of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, or Night by Elie Wiesel, or A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah.
Will Schwalbe
#11. And I, Nephi, took one of the daughters of Ishmael to wife.' Well Mr. Go-And-Do just went and did!
John Bytheway
#12. WHEN ISHMAEL WOKE, the walls of his trench were seeping water and the dawn was colder than it should have been, the sky an unnatural and ubiquitous pale color that had less to do with the rising of the sun than the passing of the night.
James Lee Burke
#13. Ishmael Beah was born and spent his childhood in Sierra Leone as that sad but beautiful West African country was ravaged by a civil war that left some 50,000 dead between 1991 and 2002. He was a child soldier for a while, then, through extraordinary circumstances, was set free of that life.
Carolyn See
#14. Looking around, Ishmael noted that the humans in control here didn't seem to care. Why is their religious fervor acceptable, while ours is a matter of scorn?
Brian Herbert
#15. To Ishmael, the whale's indefinite whiteness' shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation. [It's] a color-less, all-color of atheism from which we shrink.
Herman Melville
#16. Ishmael was looking at him through narrowed eyes. "This is very important to you, this box."
"It's important to the world."
Ishmael said: "The sun rises, and the sun sets. Sometimes it rains. We live, then we die." He shrugged.
He would never understand, Wolff thought; but others would.
Ken Follett
#17. As God's child advances spiritually be shall discover that the Lord's time is as important as the Lord's will. Do not rashly beget an Ishmael lest he become the greatest enemy to Isaac.
Watchman Nee
#19. Captain Ahab drowned, he reminded himself; it was the trimmer, Ishmael, who survived.
Salman Rushdie
#20. Ishy, you got any homework?"
"If it's fractions, I'll help you," Sam said.
"Hen still doesn't know how to do fractions."
"I have spelling words I have to mesmerize," Ishmael said
"Those words will never know what hit them" Sam said.
Nick Wilgus
#21. The guy's got a CCI sheet so long it begins with 'Call me Ishmael.
James Patterson
#22. In Ishmael I articulated a living mythology that is so integral to our culture that it's never examined or even noticed by anyone. It's like the sound of blood rushing through your veins - you hear it so constantly that you don't hear it at all.
Daniel Quinn
#23. In the eleventh century, a Jerusalem rabbi still recalled with gratitude the mercy God had shown his people when he allowed the "Kingdom of Ishmael" to conquer Palestine.
Karen Armstrong
#24. There shall be in the church a fleshly seed of Abraham and a spiritual; a Cain and an Abel; an Ishmael and an Isaac; an Esau and a Jacob; as I have said, a worker and a believer; a great multitude of them that be called, and a small flock of them that be elect and chosen.31
Steven J. Lawson
#25. Call me Ishmael. I won't answer to it, because it's not my name.
Jenny Lawson
#26. When we look at Abraham, Sarah, Hagar and Ishmael, we see that God's grace can survive our three-ring-circuses of compromise, rationalization and weak faith.
Carl Prude Jr.
#27. If you can't discover what's keeping you in, the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual - Ishmael
Daniel Quinn
#28. I get most my information about what's happening in the United States from reports and studies, which are often in conflict with what you read on the editorial pages, or handouts from right wing institutions like the American Enterprise Institute.
Ishmael Reed
#29. It isn't about knowing the most stories, child. It is about carrying the ones that are most important and passing them along.
Ishmael Beah
#30. Whites have been the most subsidized group in the history of the United States and maybe the history of the world, while Blacks were enslaved and were the assets of Whites.
Ishmael Reed
#31. This was one of the consequences of the civil war. People stopped trusting each other, and every stranger became an enemy.
Ishmael Beah
#32. The sun's brightness painted our shadows on the ground.
Ishmael Beah
#33. As a writer, you explore all kinds of different emotions.
Ishmael Reed
#34. I think I have a pugnacious style. My style is not pretty. I don't use words like "amber" or "opaque."
Ishmael Reed
#35. I consider racism to be a medical problem. Racists need serious medical and psychiatric help, because they are killing themselves and making others suffer along with them.
Ishmael Reed
#36. Richard Price, who has made a fortune writing fake ghetto books, says he takes a cab into the ghetto, transcribes Black speech for a brief time and returns home. His fake ghetto books have bought him a townhouse in Gramercy Park and home on Staten Island.
Ishmael Reed
#37. We had not only lost our childhood in the war but our lives had been tainted by the same experiences that still caused us great pain and sadness.
Ishmael Beah
#38. These days I live in three worlds: my dreams, and the experiences of my new life, which trigger memories from the past. (page 20)
Ishmael Beah
#39. I joined the army to avenge the deaths of my family and to survive, but I've come to learn that if I am going to take revenge, in that process I will kill another person whose family will want revenge; then revenge and revenge and revenge will never come to an end ...
Ishmael Beah
#40. In early 1993, when I was 12, I was separated from my family as the Sierra Leone civil war, which began two years earlier, came into my life.
Ishmael Beah
#41. I took out my grenade and put my fingers inside the pin. 'Do you boys want this to be your last meal, or do you want to answer his question?
Ishmael Beah
#42. Sometimes a story does not make immediate sense - one has to listen and keep it in one's heart, in one's blood, until the day it will become useful. The
Ishmael Beah
#43. Multicultural is not a description of a category of American writing-it is a definition of all American writing.
Ishmael Reed
#44. I have T.V. on all the time when I'm writing. I have music on. I'm engaged with the world.
Ishmael Reed
#45. Ethnic life in the United States has become a sort of contest like baseball in which the blacks are always the Chicago Cubs.
Ishmael Reed
#46. Native Americans were driven off their land. Lincoln even took part in the Black Hawk campaign against the Native Americans in Illinois. While they were being exterminated and driven off their land, Whites were collecting assets.
Ishmael Reed
#48. My stuff is direct. Critics have compared my writing style with boxing all the way back to 1978 when my first book of essays appeared: it was compared to Muhammad Ali's style.
Ishmael Reed
#49. I was challenged to a fistfight by Margo Jefferson, the Pulitzer Prize winner, New York Times writer, who is part of a feminist clique at the Times, which believes that Black men are the principal threat to the women of the world.
Ishmael Reed
#50. As long as a man does not sin, he is feared. As soon as he sins, he himself is in fear.
Rabbi Ishmael
#51. That kind of thing happens to black people every day in this country, and they don't receive that kind of sentence he did, which was to go to prison on the weekends; I think he lectured there-an outside lecturer.
Ishmael Reed
#52. [David] Mamet is another hypocrite. His idea of Black man is a pimp who abuses women, [Edmond], yet his play Oleanna [1994] ends with a White professor slapping an uppity feminist, at least the version I saw at San Francisco's ACT.
Ishmael Reed
#53. You can only threaten someone with hell if they have never had hell
Ishmael Beah
#54. Children have the resilience to outlive their sufferings, if given a chance.
Ishmael Beah
#55. If you are alive, there is hope for a better day and something good to happen. If there is nothing good left in the destiny of a person, he or she will die.
Ishmael Beah
#56. Whenever I speak at the United Nations, UNICEF or elsewhere to raise awareness of the continual and rampant recruitment of children in wars around the world, I come to realize that I still do not fully understand how I could have possibly survived the civil war in my country, Sierra Leone.
Ishmael Beah
#57. The descendants of Holy Roman Empire monarchies became feeble-minded in the twentieth century, and after World War I had been done in by the democracies; some were kept on to entertain the tourists, like the one they have in England.
Ishmael Reed
#58. Some nights the sky wept stars that quickly floated and disappeared into the darkness before our wishes could meet them.
Ishmael Beah
#59. Shakespeare is absolutely big in Africa. I guess he's big everywhere. Growing up, Shakespeare was the thing. You'd learn monologues and you'd recite them. And just like hip-hop, it made you feel like you knew how to speak English really well. You had a mastery of the English language to some extent.
Ishmael Beah
#60. Writing has made me a better man. It has put me in contact with those fleeting moments which prove the existence.
Ishmael Reed
#61. I've always wondered why European politicians as a group seemed brighter than American politicians as a group. Maybe it's becausemany American politicians have the race issue to fall back on. They become lazy, suspicious of innovative ideas, and as a result American institutions atrophy.
Ishmael Reed
#63. I am always quiet so that I know what to say when I must speak.
Ishmael Beah
#64. I asked Joe Weixlmann why he would print a death threat like that in light of the fact that there are all of these armed ideological nuts wandering around loose. He said that for him, to "ice" someone means to reprimand them.
Ishmael Reed
#65. As for [Amiri] Baraka, he and I have disagreements. I mean, he becomes a demagogue when there's an audience. He's a nice guy in private. I mean I like the guy; he's a terrific writer. I've published two of his books. Baraka is one of these fundamentalists who is prone to idol worship.
Ishmael Reed
#66. In Haitian mythology there is the figure Ghede, who in West Africa, is Iku, whose role is to show "each man his devil." He's represented by a figure wearing a top hat and smoking a cigar. That's my gig.
Ishmael Reed
#67. My teeth became sour as I listened to his story. It was then that I understood why he was quiet all the time.
Ishmael Beah
#68. The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies.
Ishmael Reed
#69. But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound.
Herman Melville
#70. I think there are fundamentalists all over the world. I think all religions have fundamentalists who have different interpretations of scriptures that are very vague.
Ishmael Reed
#72. My mother tongue, Mende, is very expressive, very figurative, and when I write, I always struggle to find the English equivalent of things that I really want to say in Mende. For example, in Mende, you wouldn't say 'night came suddenly'; you would say 'the sky rolled over and changed its sides.'
Ishmael Beah
#73. When I say Afro-American aesthetic, I'm not just talking about the United States, I'm talking about the Americas. People in the Latin countries read my books because they share the same international aesthetic that I'm into and have been into for a long time. And it's multicultural.
Ishmael Reed
#74. I believe that there is a God, and coming from an African tradition, I believe also that there are gods.
Ishmael Beah
#75. Do you think that Gwendolyn Brooks would give an award to someone who hated Black women, the lie that was circulated throughout New York and reached all the way down to Martinique where I was a guest Professor? The lie was circulated by people who don't read my books.
Ishmael Reed
#76. caring about lives is not caring about your own life. it's all about giving your last breath for others to live. The caring man is like the last crab out of a bucket. letting others step on your back to get out, and letting you not step on others back and that is love.
Christian
#77. My squad is my family, my gun is my provider, and protector, and my rule is to kill or be killed.
Ishmael Beah
#78. Circumstances will change and things will be fine, just hold on a little more
Ishmael Beah
#79. I'm sure that you could go back and make a graph showing that all the killings of black males increased in times of economic difficulty. As a matter of fact, a black man was lynched last year.
Ishmael Reed
#80. The branches of the trees looked as if they were holding hands and bowing their heads in prayer.
Ishmael Beah
#81. American cultural institutions seem so bent on preserving the values of "Western civilization," the mythical "Whitetown," that welearn about one another's cultures the same way we learn about sex: in the streets.
Ishmael Reed
#82. Putting food under lock and key was one of the great innovations of your culture. No other culture in history has ever put food under lock and key - and putting it there is the cornerstone of your economy.[ ... ] Because if the food wasn't under lock and key, Julie, who would work?
Daniel Quinn
#83. It's exhausting writing nonfiction, particularly when it's personal. It's tiring, always speaking about things that are not necessarily fun retelling.
Ishmael Beah
#84. I was sad to leave, but I was also pleased to have met people outside of Sierra Leone. Because if I was to get killed upon my return, I knew that a memory of my existence was alive somewhere in the world.
Ishmael Beah
#85. My conception of New York City came from rap music. I envisioned it as a place where people shot each other on the street and got away with it; no one walked on the streets, rather people drove in their sports cars looking for nightclubs and for violence.
Ishmael Beah
#86. I had no systematic way of learning but proceeded like a quilt maker, a patch of knowledge here a patch there but lovingly knitted. I would hungrily devour the intellectual scraps and leftovers of the learned.
Ishmael Reed
#87. I finally had to go to the American Civil Liberties Union here in northern California to get my reply published to what I considered to be a hatchet job done by Stanley Crouch.
Ishmael Reed
#88. We danced and laughed into the morning. But gradually we stopped. It was as if we all knew that we could be happy for only a brief moment.
Ishmael Beah
#89. Phillip Roth uses his Black women characters to make anti intellectual remarks about Black history month, begun by a man who reached intellectual heights that Roth will never attain.Roth is a petty bigot and his ignorant remarks about black culture expose him as a buffoon to scholars the world over.
Ishmael Reed
#90. What was once dormant is now a Creeping Thing
Ishmael Reed
#91. In the sky there are always answers and explanations for everything: every pain, every suffering, joy and confusion.
Ishmael Beah
#92. I lay in my bed night after night staring at the ceiling and thinking, Why have I survived the war? Why was I the last person in my immediate family to be alive? I didn't know.
Ishmael Beah
#93. The plays raise issues that are ignored in other forums.
Ishmael Reed
#94. We must live in the radiance of tomorrow, as our ancestors have suggested in their tales. For what is yet to come tomorrow has possibilities, and we must think of it, the simplest glimpse of that possibility of goodness. That will be our strength. That has always been our strength.
Ishmael Beah
#95. One of the joys of reading is the ability to plug into the shared wisdom of mankind.
Ishmael Reed
#96. The thing that really gets to me is that countries are in the news only when things get out of hand. That's when it's newsworthy. When the war ends, it's not newsworthy anymore; no one wants to think about it. Actually, the aftermath is the most important part. It's when people have to rebuild.
Ishmael Beah
#97. Another California study counted 30,000 substance abusers who are pregnant are White woman. So, The Wire paints the picture of drug addiction, drug dealing, and drug abuse as being a specifically a Black issue.
Ishmael Reed
#98. I'm sure that a previous generation of Jews who published radical newspapers and journals would be critical of [David] Simon's projects. These were left wingers who suffered casualties in some of bloodiest strikes in American history.
Ishmael Reed
#99. All art must be for the end of liberating the masses. A landscape is only good when it shows the oppressor hanging from a tree.
Ishmael Reed
#100. In the spiritual life nowhere do our ideals meet the actual more truly than in how we relate to each other, in how we make, sustain and are friends.
James Ishmael Ford
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