Herman Melville quotes

“I would prefer not to.”

— Spoken by a character

“At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable,” was his mildly cadaverous reply.

— Spoken by a character

“Follow your leader.”

— Spoken by a character · BARTLEBY

Ah this slavery breeds ugly passions in man.

Meantime the sound of the parted waters came more and more gurglingly and merrily in at the windows; as reproaching him for his dark spleen; as telling him that, sulk as he might, and go mad with it, nature cared not a jot; since, whose fault was it, pray?

If the Deposition have served as the key to fit into the lock of the complications which precede it, then, as a vault whose door has been flung back, the San Dominick’s hull lies open to-day.

Some months after, dragged to the gibbet at the tail of a mule, the black met his voiceless end.

“You generalize, Don Benito; and mournfully enough. But the past is passed; why moralize upon it? Forget it. See, yon bright sun has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves.”

“Because they have no memory,” he dejectedly replied; “because they are not human.”

— Spoken by a character · BARTLEBY

Ah, thought he, after good actions one’s conscience is never ungrateful, however much so the benefited party may be.

That moment, across the long-benighted mind of Captain Delano, a flash of revelation swept, illuminating, in unanticipated clearness, his host’s whole mysterious demeanor, with every enigmatic event of the day, as well as the entire past voyage of the San Dominick.

The morning was one peculiar to that coast. Everything was mute and calm; everything gray. The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter’s mould. The sky seemed a gray surtout.

Flights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors among which they were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms. Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.

At the penultimate moment, his words, his only ones, words wholly unobstructed in the utterance, were these--‘God bless Captain Vere!’

Call me Ishmael.

And we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.

In time of peril, like the needle to the loadstone, obedience, irrespective of rank, generally flies to him who is best fitted to command.