"Moby Dick"
Jun. 24th, 2012 12:31 amA church visit:
- why the Life Insurance Companies pay death-forfeitures upon immortals;
- there is death in this business of whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity.
- Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.
- with both hands grasping the ornamental knobs of the man-ropes, Father Mapple cast a look upwards, and then with a truly sailor-like but still reverential dexterity, hand over hand, mounted the steps as if ascending the main-top of his vessel.
- Yes, the world's a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.
- The ribs and terrors in the whale, Arched overme a dismal gloom, While all God's sun-lit waves rolled by, And lift me deepening down to doom.
- But all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do—remember that— and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade.
- it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.
- Joppa, the modern Jaffa, shipmates, is on the most easterly coast of the Mediterranean, the Syrian; and Tarshish or Cadiz more than two thousand miles to the westward from that, just outside the Straits of Gibraltar. See ye not then, shipmates, that Jonah sought to flee worldwide from God?
- In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.
- 'Oh! so my conscience hangs in me!' he groans, "straight upward, so it burns; but the chambers of my soul are all in.
- Wave after wave thus leaps into the ship, and finding no speedy vent runs roaring fore and aft, till the mariners come nigh to drowning while yet afloat.
- He goes down in the whirling heart of such a masterless commotion / the ocean's utmost bones