It's A Stereotype, Isn't It?

I mean the movie Heathers used it to paint a picture of the mental state of a character. Really, is there anything more pretentious than quoting Moby Dick?

I finally gave in and joined Facebook. Part of creating my profile was to add "favorite quotes." I started thinking about all of my favorite quotes and quickly realized just how many of them come from this book. So, I figured I'd just add them as a post.

I realize most of you won't read all of them but give a few of them a look. If you feel like investing the time, I can tell you they are even better within the context of the entire book.

"Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance."

"...even pirates and privateers, though following the sea as highwaymen the road, they but plunder other ships, other fragments of the land like themselves, without seeking to draw their living from the bottomless deep itself."

"Mark ye, be forewarned; Ahab's above the common; Ahab's been in colleges, as well as 'mong the cannibals; been used to deeper wonders than the waves; fixed his fiery lance in mightier stranger foes than whales. His lance! aye, the keenest and the surest that out of all our isle! Oh! he ain't Captain Bildad; no, and he ain't Captain Peleg; he's Ahab, boy; and Ahab of old, thou knowest, was a crowned king!"

"...and Heaven have mercy on us all - Presbyterians and Pagans alike - for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending."

"hear him, all of ye. Think of that! When every moment we thought the ship would sink! Death and the judgment then? What? With all three masts making such an everlasting thundering against the side; and every sea breaking over us, fore and aft. Think of Death and the Judgment then? No! no time to think about Death then. Life was what Captain Ahab and I was thinking of; and how to save all hands - how to rig jury-masts - how to get into the nearest port; that was what I was thinking of."

"The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that's kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship's direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through."

"But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God..."

"Doubtless one leading reason why the world declines honoring us whalemen, is this: they think that, at best, our vocation amounts to a butchering sort of business; and that when actively engaged therein, we are surrounded by all manner of defilements. Butchers we are, that is true. But butchers, also, and butchers of the bloodiest badge have been all Martial Commanders whom the world invariably delights to honor. And as for the matter of the alleged uncleanliness of our business, ye shall soon be initiated into certain facts hitherto pretty generally unknown, and which, upon the whole, will triumphantly plant the sperm whale-ship at least among the cleanliest things of this tidy earth. But even granting the charge in question to be true; what disordered slippery decks of a whale-ship are comparable to the unspeakable carrion of those battle-fields from which so many soldiers return to drink in all ladies' plaudits? And if the idea of peril so much enhances the popular conceit of the soldier's profession; let me assure ye that many a veteran who has freely marched up to a battery, would quickly recoil at the apparition of the sperm whale's vast tail, fanning into eddies the air over his head. For what are the comprehensible terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God!

But, though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it unwittingly pay us the profoundest homage; yea, an all-abounding adoration! for almost all the tapers, lamps, and candles that burn round the globe, burn, as before so many shrines, to our glory!"

"...for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard."

"I will have no man in my boat," said Starbuck, "who is not afraid of a whale."

"Starbuck was no crusader after perils; in him courage was not a sentiment; but a thing simply useful to him, and always at hand upon all mortally practical occasions."

"Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes. That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves, so far within us, that it remains intact though all the outer character seem gone; bleeds with keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle of a valor-ruined man."

"...he presided over his whale-boat as if the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, and his crew all invited guests."

"...for every one knows that this earthly air, whether ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless miseries of the numberless mortals who have died exhaling it..."

"...he seemed as unnecessary there as another mast."

"More than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any other man, would have soon flowered out in a smile."

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

"For a Khan of the plank, and a king of the sea, and a great lord of Leviathans was Ahab."

"Aye, aye! and I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the horn, and round the norway maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up."

"He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it."

"Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me."

"Oh, hard! that to fire others, the match itself must needs be wasting!"

>"Because a laugh's the wisest, easiest answer to all that's queer;"

"Dance on, lads, you're young; I was once."

"Now would all the waves were women, then I'd go drown..."

"For not only are whalemen as a body unexempt from that ignorance and superstitiousness hereditary to all sailors; but of all sailors, they are by all odds the most directly brought into contact with whatever is appallingly astonishing in the sea; face to face they not only eye its greatest marvels, but, hand to jaw, give battle to them."

"...it cannot be much matter of surprise that some whalemen should go still further in their superstitions; declaring Moby Dick not only ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time)..."

"...all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it."

"...all my means are sane, my motive and my object mad."

"Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright."

"For God's sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man's blood was spilled for it."

"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."