Top 100 Quotes About Melville
#1. I don't have a favorite author; I have favorite books. 'Moby Dick' is a favorite book, but Melville was a drunk who beat his wife. 'Moveable Feast' by Hemingway, but I would not like him personally. He was a stupid macho person who believed in shooting animals for fun, but that book was incredible!
Gary Paulsen
#2. Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.
Edward Dahlberg
#3. Neither Rousseau nor Robespierre was capable of dreaming of a goodness beyond virtue, just as they were unable to imagine that radical evil would 'partake nothing of the sordid or sensual' (Melville), that there could be wickedness beyond vice.
Hannah Arendt
#4. Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited or restricted canvases. These are the children of the gods.
Ray Bradbury
#5. I kept my door more securely locked than ever and passed the time with foreign novels. Since Balzac was Luo's favourite I put him to one side, and with the ardour and earnestness of my eighteen years I fell in love with one author after another: Flaubert, Gogol, Melville, and even Romain Rolland.
Dai Sijie
#7. Melville, in his relation to belief, was like the last guest who cannot leave the party; he was always returning to see if he had left his had and gloves.
James Wood
#8. As Herman Melville wrote of that seagoing monster of a man Captain Ahab, "All mortal greatness is but disease.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#9. Herman Melville was supposed to be an accountant. Van Gogh was meant to be an art dealer. I was meant to take the train into New York and work for a bank. To be an artist, you have to say goodbye to your family.
Don McLean
#10. Melville brought to the task a sound knowledge of actual whaling, much curious learning in the literature of the subject, and, above all, an imagination which worked with great power upon the facts of his own experience.
Carl Clinton Van Doren
#11. Crazies always recognize each other. I think Melville said it, in a slightly different context: "Genius all over the world stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round." Of course, we're not talking about genius here, we're talking about crazies - but
Alex Haley
#12. My first attraction to writing novels was the plot, that almost extinct animal. Those novels I read which made me want to be a novelist were long, always plotted, novels - not just Victorian novels, but also those of my New England ancestors: Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
John Irving
#13. Melville has his tics, but he always put his words in the right order. Once you fall under the spell of the writer, you look past those ticks because you are more interested in what the writer says than judging how well he grasped the editorial conventions of his time.
Mary Norris
#14. Melville, by his own account, spent four months in the valley. He was well treated. He made friends with a girl called Fayaway, swam and boated with her, and except for his fear of being eaten was happy enough.
W. Somerset Maugham
#15. Everybody talked about Freud when I lived in New Orleans, but I have never read him. Neither did Shakespeare. I doubt if Melville did either, and I'm sure Moby Dick didn't.
(William Faulkner)
William Faulkner
#16. Melville died in New York on September 28, 1891, blissfully unaware that, in the years to come, so many people would leave the hyphen out of Moby-Dick.
Richard Armour
#17. There was nothing normal about the divine twin sproutings that formed Rachel Melville's magically springy chest. Almost involuntarily Ronnie found himself nodding like an obedient puppy.
Jamie Holoran
#18. You know who my gods are, who I believe in fervently? Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson - she's probably the top - Mozart, Shakespeare, Keats. These are wonderful gods who have gotten me through the narrow straits of life.
Maurice Sendak
#19. She had not learned from reading it that adultery was good or that we should all become shysters. Did people all go on strike or head west after reading Steinbeck? Did they go whaling after reading Melville? Are people not a little more complex than that?
Azar Nafisi
#20. I cling to the idea that Herman Melville had to work at the end of his career watching ships in a dock, as a shipping agent in New York. Any writer who thinks they should be given patronage because of their gift ... you don't have to look too far in history to see that's just not the case.
Jess Walter
#21. Dewey was obsessed with efficiency. He even changed his name from "Melville" to "Melvil" as a time-saving gesture and briefly even changed his last name to "Dui.
Alex Wright
#22. When the vision fills your brain and passion hits your gut, the need to write it down cannot be stifled.
(Marti Melville)
Marti Melville
#23. We do not know whether Melville's work is of universal interest because we have not reached the end of history yet, despite the best efforts of some of our political leaders.
Terry Eagleton
#24. The great writers, Conrad, Maugham and Melville, spent only a few years in the South Seas, but their memory of those waters was indestructible; for the nature of life in the islands commands attention to the vivid world and its even more vivid inhabitants.
James A. Michener
#26. Many of the writers I admire - Melville, Dickinson, Kafka - were virtually invisible during their lifetimes. Art, I think, often has to dance around in the void.
Jerome Charyn
#27. There is always something of the writer in the work but I don't think Melville had to be swallowed by a whale to write a great novel. If I had lived the lives of all the characters of the songs I've written, that would truly be an extraordinary story.
Michael Stipe
#28. Shakespeare wrote Moby-Dick, using Melville as a Ouija board.
Ray Bradbury
#29. Man's deliberate destruction of his own habitat
planet Earth
could serve as a mighty theme for a mighty book worthy of a modern Melville or Tolstoy. But our best fictioneers confine themselves to domestic drama
soap opera with literary trimmings.
Edward Abbey
#30. The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me.
Harold Bloom
#31. The horror genre is vast and full of brilliance. Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Herman Melville, the book of Esther. I'll happily join that list.
Victor LaValle
#32. Besides, 99 hundredths of all the work done in the world is either foolish and unnecessary, or harmful and wicked."
Herman Melville
Peter Wortsman
#33. If you cannot read Shakespeare, or Melville, or Toni Morrison because it will trigger something traumatic in you, and you'll be harmed by the read of the text because you are still defining yourself through your self-victimization, then you need to see a doctor.
Bret Easton Ellis
#34. Or why you are wearing a picture of Santa Clause on you shirts, but-"
"It's Herman Melville.
Lemony Snicket
#35. She [Beatrice] alone was still real for him, still implied meaning in the world, and beauty. Her nature became his landmark - what Melville would call, with more sobriety than we can now muster, his Greenwich Standard ...
Dan Simmons
#36. Updike's style is an exquisite blend of Melville and Austen: reading him is like cutting through whale blubber with embroidery scissors.
Florence King
#37. The Bible is very resonant. It has everything: creation, betrayal, lust, poetry, prophecy, sacrifice. All great things are in the Bible, and all great writers have drawn from it and more than people realise, whether Shakespeare, Herman Melville or Bob Dylan.
Patti Smith
#38. I can describe my books as I seem them as American, imaginative, symbolic. My literary ancestors are two other Calvinists, Hawthorne, and Melville.
James Purdy
#39. The Middle East, that seductive region where [Herman] Melville had hoped to rekindle his inspiration and revive his diminishing career, had proved an egregious disappointment. "The whole thing is half melancholy, half farcical," he groaned, "like all the rest of the world.
Michael B. Oren
#40. People who say they don't have enough patience to knit are precisely those who could most improve their lives by learning how!" - Sally Melville,
Debbie Macomber
#41. Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste than Herman Melville.
D.H. Lawrence
#42. Melville's example demonstrates the wisdom of waiting to read the classics. Coming to a great book on your own after having accumulated essential life experience can make all the difference.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#43. I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don't get hay fever in New England either.
John Updike
#44. I know the secrets; I dig Joyce and Proust above Melville and Celine.
Jack Kerouac
#45. Melville locked himself away in his room for months while working on 'Moby Dick.' If I ever decide to write a novel, I hope someone will take pity on me and take me out to dinner instead.
Marge Simon
#46. Melville to Hawthorne: "In your stories, you seem to understand that the dramatic moments come not when a character must choose between right and wrong buy when he must choose between two wrongs.
Mark Beauregard
#48. Pierre little foresaw that this world hath a secret deeper than beauty, and Life some burdens heavier than death.
Herman Melville
#49. I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.
Herman Melville
#50. No town-bred dandy will compare with a country-bred one- I mean a downright bumpkin dandy- a fellow that, in the dog-days of summer, will mow his two acres in buckskin gloves for fear of tanning his hands.
Herman Melville
#51. I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling.
Herman Melville
#53. Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief.
Herman Melville
#54. Whatever has made, or does make, or may make music, should be held sacred as the golden bridle-bit of the Shah of Persia's horse,and the golden hammer, with which his hoofs are shod.
Herman Melville
#55. The so-called Transcendentalists are not the only people who deal in Transcendentals. On the contrary, we seem to see that the Utilitarians,
the every-day world's people themselves, far transcend those inferior Transcendentalists by their own incomprehensible worldly maxims.
Herman Melville
#56. Students of history are horror-struck at the massacres of old; but in the shambles, men are being murdered to-day.
Herman Melville
#57. He pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me around my waist, and said henceforth we were married.
Herman Melville
#58. Wag the world how it will, Leaves must be green in Spring.
Herman Melville
#59. In childhood, death stirred me not; in middle age, it pursued me like a prowling bandit on the road; now, grown an old man, it boldly leads the way, and ushers me on.
Herman Melville
#60. If you begin the day with a laugh, you may, nevertheless, end it with a sob and a sigh.
Herman Melville
#61. He offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom of the sea.
Herman Melville
#62. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in time. What
Herman Melville
#63. There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
Herman Melville
#64. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without - oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command!
Herman Melville
#65. That before living agent, now became the living instrument.
Herman Melville
#66. That one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.
Herman Melville
#67. Better be secure under one king, than exposed to violence from twenty millions of monarchs, though oneself be one of them.
Herman Melville
#70. As with ships, so with men; he who turns his back to his foe gives him an advantage.
Herman Melville
#71. It's the honest point of view of an artist: You have to please.I'd like viewers to come away from my films unsure whether they've understood them. I want to leave them wondering.
Jean-Pierre Melville
#72. I'll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy.
Herman Melville
#73. Ah! the best righteousness of our man-of-war world seems but an unrealized ideal, after all; and those maxims which, in the hope of bringing about a Millennium, we busily teach to the heathen, we Christians ourselves disregard.
Herman Melville
#74. He's no more afraid than the isle fort at Cattegat, put there to fight the Baltic with storm-lashed guns, on which the sea-salt cakes!
Herman Melville
#75. The Emancipation Proclamation is predicated upon the idea that the President may so annul the constitutions and laws of sovereign states, overthrow their domestic relations, deprive loyal men of their property, and disloyal as well, without trial or condemnation.
Melville Fuller
#77. You would do well to turn from Chapter XXXVI to Chapter CXXXIII without further delay, thus saving nearly a hundred chapters without anybody's knowing the difference if you keep quiet. After all, Ahab isn't the only one entitled to be a skipper.
Richard Armour
#78. The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up - flaked up, with rose-water snow.
Herman Melville
#79. What man who carries a heavenly soul in him, has not groaned to perceive, that unless he committed a sort of suicide as to the practical things of this world, he never can hope to regulate his earthly conduct by that same heavenly soul?
Herman Melville
#80. The names of all fine authors are fictitious ones, far more so than that of Junius,
simply standing, as they do, for the mystical, ever-eluding Spirit of all Beauty, which ubiquitously possesses men of genius.
Herman Melville
#81. What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament?
Herman Melville
#82. I have nine children ... and one of them is an invalid. Her mother is obliged to take her away in the winter, and when one bird is off the nest, the other has to go on.
Melville Fuller
#83. There is something in us, somehow, that, in the most degraded condition, we snatch at a chance to deceive ourselves into a fanciedsuperiority to others, whom we suppose lower in the scale than ourselves.
Herman Melville
#85. Appalling is the soul of a man! Better might one be pushed off into the material spaces beyond the uttermost orbit of our sun, than once feel himself fairly afloat in himself.
Herman Melville
#86. Yes, I have heard something curious on that score sir, how that a dismasted man never entirely loses the feeling of his old spar, but it will still be pricking him at time.
Herman Melville
#87. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.
Herman Melville
#88. Stripped of the cunning artifices of the tailor, and standing forth in the garb of Eden - what a sorry set of round-shouldered, spindle-shanked, crane-necked varlets would civilized men appear!
Herman Melville
#89. Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air!
Herman Melville
#90. Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there's a member-roll for you! What club but the whaleman's can head off like that?
Herman Melville
#91. There is mystery in everything," Herman whispered, almost to himself. "And so there is poetry in everything. Even something as monstrous as a whale. But how to unlock its poetry.
Mark Beauregard
#92. Zeal is not of necessity religion, neither is it always of the same essence with poetry or patriotism.
Herman Melville
#93. To the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee.
Herman Melville
#94. Admiral Nelson, also, on a capstan of gun-metal, stands his mast-head in Trafalgar Square; and even when most obscured by that London smoke, token is yet given that a hidden hero is there; for where there is smoke, must be fire.
Herman Melville
#95. At sea a fellow comes out. Salt water is like wine, in that respect.
Herman Melville
#96. He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great.
Herman Melville
#98. The Marquesan girls dance all over; not only do their feet dance, but their arms, hands, fingers, ay, their very eyes seem to dance in their heads.
Herman Melville
#99. So long as a man-of-war exists, it must ever remain a picture of much that is tyrannical and repelling in human nature.
Herman Melville
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