Hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world's vast bulk its small but valuable sperm; and then, with weary p...atience, cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done, when--Thar she blows!--the ghost is spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life's old routine again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whale on the beach, you dinosaur, what brought you smoothing into this dead harbor?... If you'd stayed inside you could have grown as big as the Empire State.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The purpose of ritual for men is to learn the rules of power and competition. Watching sports together, for example, they see the ...formal enactment of ritual, become loyal to a team, learn to conceal their vulnerability. The purpose of ritual for women (going to lunch together, sharing a favorite salon, etc.) is to learn how to make human connections. They are often more intimate and vulnerable with one another than they are with their men, and taking care of other women teaches them to take care of themselves. In these formal ways, men and women domesticate their emotional lives. But their strategies are different, their biological itineraries are different. His sperm needs to travel, her egg needs to settle down. It's astonishing that they survive happily at all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[T]he minister preached a sermon on Jonah and the whale, at the end of which an old chief arose and declared, "We have heard sever...al of the white people talk and lie; we know they will lie, but this is the biggest lie we ever heard."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I reside at Table Mountain, and my name is Truthful James; I am not up to small deceit, or any sinful games;... And I'll tell in simple language what I know about the row That broke up our society upon the Stanislow. But first I would remark, that it is not a proper plan For any scientific man to whale his fellow-man,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ishmael's thought consciously extends itself to get behind the world of appearances; he wants to see and to understand everything.... Ahab's drive is to prove, not to discover; the world that tortures Ishmael by its horrid vacancy has tempted Ahab into thinking he can make it over. He seeks to dominate nature, to impose and inflict his will on the outside world--whether it be the crew that must jump to his orders or the great white whale that is essentially indifferent to him. As Ishmael is all rumination, so Ahab is all will. Both are thinkers, the difference being that Ishmael thinks as a bystander, has identified his own state with man's utter unimportance in nature. Ahab, by contrast, actively seeks the whale in order to assert man's supremacy over what swims before him as "the monomaniac incarnation" of a superior power.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent....
All the whales in the wider deeps, hot are they, as they urge on and on, and dive beneath the icebergs. The right whales, the sperm-whales, the hammer-heads, the killers there they blow, there they blow, hot wild white breath out of the sea!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Women are the fulfilled sex. Through our children we are able to produce our own immortality, so we lack that divine restlessness ...which sends men charging off in pursuit of fortune or fame or an imagined Utopia. That is why we number so few geniuses among us. The wholesome oyster wears no pearl, the healthy whale no ambergris, and as long as we can keep on adding to the race, we harbor a sort of health within ourselves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »