is it as marvellous a thing

he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation.

I saw the opening maw of hell, With endless pains and sorrows there; Which none but they that feel can tell— Oh, I was plunging to despair.

all for love

This ended, in prolonged solemn tones, like the continual tolling of a bell in a ship that is foundering at sea in a fog

Let us scrape the ice from our frosted feet, and see what sort of a place this “Spouter” may be.

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!

as the blubber envelopes the whale precisely as the rind does an orange, so is it stripped off from the body precisely as an orange is sometimes stripped by spiralizing it

somehow and somewhere

it arched forth its vast archangel wings, as if to embrace some holy ark

It is a German conceit, that the vertebræ are absolutely undeveloped skulls.

a sound so strange, long drawn, and musically wild and unearthly, that the ball of free will dropped from my hand

a laugh’s the wisest, easiest answer to all that’s queer

The devil fetch ye, ye ragamuffin rapscallions; ye are all asleep. Stop snoring, ye sleepers

strange subterranean commotions

This wilful world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon’s wisdom yet.

owing to the mystery of the spout—whether it be water or whether it be vapour—no absolute certainty can as yet be arrived at

As for the sons and the daughters they beget, why, those sons and daughters must take care of themselves

I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules.

You must go home and be born over again; you don’t know how to cook a whale-steak yet.

Thy rod—mortal or immortal, here I die.

A short life to them, and a jolly death.

the spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at last into simple child’s play

this kind of travel, I say, may not be the very best mode of attaining a high social polish

did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land?

it is hidden away behind its vast outworks, like the innermost citadel within the amplified fortifications of Quebec

The drama’s done.

the place where he stood was so treacherous and oozy

Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water

by no means prevent all communications

It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.

the skeleton of a sperm whale

I cannot tell why it was exactly

woe to that sailor, whiskers and all

all at once the exhausted harpooneer hears the exciting cry—“Stand up, and give it to him!”

But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm

with what wondrous habitude of unconscious skill the whaleman will maintain an erect posture in his boat, even when pitched about by the most riotously perverse and cross-running seas

My dear sir, in this world it is not so easy to settle these plain things.

and what is more, the Sperm Whale has done it

the widow of Radney still turns to the sea which refuses to give up its dead; still in dreams sees the awful white whale that destroyed him

With a terrific snap, every fastening went adrift; the ship righted, the carcase sank.

Make a life-buoy of the coffin, and no more.

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.

what is the one charm wanting?—Water—there is not a drop of water there!

“You gettee in,” he added, motioning to me with his tomahawk, and throwing the clothes to one side.

men may have mean and meagre faces

from the unmarred dead body of the whale, you may scrape off with your hand an infinitely thin, transparent substance

The vast tackles have now done their duty. The peeled white body of the beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulchre

The greater idiot ever scolds the lesser

better answer