Quotes

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by Melville

"Call me Ishmael."---first line in Moby Dick

"But how? Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever written a book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in his doing nothing particular to prove it."---Moby Dick

"Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian."---Moby Dick

"To many of them[the Marquesans], indeed, life is little else than an often interrupted and luxurious nap."---Typee

"If reason be judge, no writer has produced such inconsistent characters as nature herself has."---The Confidence-Man

"The grand points of human nature are the same to-day as they were a thousand years ago. The only variability in them is in expression, not in feature."---The Confidence-Man

"I had learned to think much and bitterly before my time; all my young mounting dreams of glory had left me; and at that early age, I was as unambitious as a man of sixty."---Redburn

"All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys."---Battle Pieces, from the poem "The March into Virginia"

"I stand for the heart. To the dogs with the head! I had rather be a fool with a heart, than Jupiter Olympus with his head."---Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne