The 74 most incredible lines in "Moby Dick"

"Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze! All the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it."

Well, it took nearly four months, but we made it. Shortly before leaving for the airport last week, I turned that final dastardly page in Moby Dick and felt bliss, exhaustion, a fleeting jolt of total cultural superiority, as well as the kind of Pavlovian sleepiness that comes from having ended most nights in this calendar year with at least a couple of pages of Melville’s finest.

Was it worth it? Absolutely yes, though I now think endurance for endurance’s sake should never be the prevailing motivation. (You are, after all, talking about someone who read the Bible twice in high school — partially so she could see if there were any loopholes no one was talking about, but mostly for the flex.) While I was somewhat prepared for the amazing figurative language, the meticulous whaling knowledge, the (less enjoyable) old timey sailor rants, I wasn’t at all prepared for how funny and downright sarcastic the writing could be.

And while I do not plan to ever reread all that again, I did want to commit to memory (and maybe save you 3.5 months of your life) with a list of my favorite zingers, with page numbers included if you end up ordering the same edition (which I do recommend even though it is too fucking big to take anywhere with you….hmm… there’s a metaphor in that….). Bolding is my own; imagine I’m underlining it with a pencil to show you amidst a shared bout of literary ecstasies. Anyway, I salute you Mr. Melville. I am also absolutely certain that you would have loved Twitter.

1. Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? (p.4)
   
   

2. What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? (5)
   
   

3. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable inflection that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. (6) (“The two orchard thieves” !! What a way to reference the reference.)
   
   

4. But as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. (7) (Really, the whole first chapter is just perfect.)
   
   

5. With halting steps I paced the streets, and passed the sign of “The Crossed Harpoons” — but it looked too expensive and jolly there. (9)
   
   

6. …as the swinging sign had a poverty-stricken sort of creak to it, I thought that here was the very spot for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea coffee. (10)
   
   

7. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted (11)

8. Yes, there is death in this business of whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. (39)
   
   

9. 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. (39)
   
   

10. …and Jonah, bruised and beaten—his ears like two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean… (50) (HM was big on the alliterations!)
    
    

11. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal. (56) (This on laying in a cozy bed — all of Chapter 10 and 11, when Ishamel is being roomies with Queequeg, is quite hilarious.)
    
    

12. I have a way of always keeping my eyes shut, in order the more to concentrate the snugness of being in bed. (56) (same, brother)
    
    

13. How I snuffed that Tartar air!—how I spurned that turnpike earth!—that common highway all over dented with the marks of slavish heels and hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity of the sea which will permit no records. (61-62)
    
    

14. But these extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no Illinois. (64) (The coastal elitism was strong even in 1851.)
    
    

15. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.” (66)
    
    

16. For what are the comprehensible terrors of a man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God! (112)
    
    

17. Uncommonly conscientious for a seaman, and endued with a deep natural relevance, the wild watery loneliness of his life did therefore strongly incline him to superstition… (117)
    
    

18. Besides, he thought, perhaps, that in this business of whaling, courage was one of the great staple outfits of the ship, like her beef and her bread, and not to be foolishly wasted. (118)
    
    

19. The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, over-flowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up—flaked up, with rose-water snow. (127)
    
    

20. The Fin-Back is not gregarious. He seems a whale-hater, as some men are man-haters. (140) (One of the best parts starts at Chapter 32, when he describes types of whales)
    
    

21. Of this whale little is known but his name … Let him go. I know little more of him, nor does anybody else. (142) (Why is the idea of HM being too lazy to describe a razor back whale so hilarious…)
    
    

22. His voracity is well known, and from the circumstance that the inner angles of his lip are curved upwards, he carries an everlasting Mephistophelean grin on his face. (143) (This is why you need the illustrated Arion Press edition, because the drawing of this whale really matches the description).
    
    

23. They are the lads that always live before the wind. (146) (He’s talking about the common porpoise lol)
    
    

24. For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience! (148) (literally every writer as they run out of steam ¼ through their first draft…)
    
    

25. It is a witchery of social czarship which there is no withstanding. (152)
    
    

26. However it was, Flask, alas! was a butterless man! (153) (so much good insult potential in this book overall)
    
    

27. While their masters, the mates, seemed afraid of the sound of the hinges of their own jaws, the harponeers chewed their food with such a relish that there was a report to it. (154)
    
    

28. Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded young philosophers to task … But all in vain; those young Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have left their opera-glasses at home. (162)
    
    

29. …when amid the chips of chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the white curds of the whale’s direful wrath into the serene, exasperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal. (185)
    
    

30. …for long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one hammock … (186)
    
    

31. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. (187)
    
    

32. If such a furious trope may stand, his special lunacy stormed his general sanity … (187)
    
    

33. Gnawed within and scorched without, with the infixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable idea… (188)
    
    

34. He was intent on audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge. (188)
    
    

35. Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light … (198) (Chapter 42, I kid you not, is basically just waxing on and on about the significance of the color white)
    
    

36. I looked around me tranquilly and contentedly, like a quiet ghost with a clean conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug family vault. (233)
    
    

37. Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe. (280)
    
    

38. Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure (281)
    
    

39. For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. (281)
    
    

40. But one transparent blue morning, when a stillness almost preternatural spread over the sea … when the long burnished sun-glade on the waters seemed a golden finger laid across them, enjoying some secrecy; when the slippered waves whispered together as they softly ran on … (282) (ICYWW, Herman was not a Pisces; he was a Leo, which checks out more tbh).
    
    

41. Hemp is a dusky, dark fellow, a sort of Indian; but Manilla [rope] is as a golden-haired Circassian to behold (285) (just an incredible sentence to behold - HM inventing new kinds of racism that have never been invented before…)
    
    

42. …he cannot thus be circumstanced without a shudder that makes the very marrow in his bones quiver in him like shaken jelly. (287)
    
    

43. Both are massive enough in all conscience; but there is a certain mathematical symmetry in the Sperm Whale’s which the Right Whale’s sadly lacks. There is more character in the Sperm Whale’s head.” (338)
    
    

44. …the peculiar position of the whale’s eyes, effectually divided as they are by many cubic feet of solid head, which towers between them like a great mountain separating two lakes in valleys … (339) (Chapter 74 on the sperm whale’s head is also just overall amazing)
    
    

45. Why then do you try to “enlarge” your mind? Subtilize it. (341)
    
    

46. What a really beautiful and chaste looking mouth! From floor to ceiling lined, or rather papered with a glistening white membrane, glossy as bridal satins. (341)
    
    

47. …in which case you will take great interest in thinking how this mighty monster is actually a diademed king of the sea, whose green crown has been put together for him in this marvellous manner. But if this whale be a king, he is a very sulky looking fellow to grace a diadem.” (343)
    
    

48. Though the certainty of this criterion is far from demonstrable, yet it has the savor of analogical probability. (345)
    
    

49. I think his broad brow to be full of a prairie-like placidity, born of a speculative indifference to death. But mark the other head’s expression … Does not this whole head seem to speak of an enormous practical resolution in facing death? This Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm Whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years. (346)
    
    

50. For unless you own the whale, you are but a provincial and sentimentalist in truth. (348)
    
    

51. In thought, a fine human brow is like the East when troubled with the morning. (356)
    
    

52. The whale, like all things that are mighty, wears a false brow to the common world. (359)
    
    

53. I rejoice in my spine, as in the firm audacious staff of that flag which I fling half out to the world. (360)
    
    

54. …Ahab’s brow was left gaunt and ribbed, like the black sand beach after some stormy tide has been gnawing it, without being able to drag the firm thing from its place. (393)
    
    

55. The delicate side-fins, and the palms of his flukes, still freshly retained the plaited crumpled appearance of a baby’s ears newly arrived from foreign parts. (398)
    
    

56. …and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve around me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy. (399)
    
    

57. Like fashionables, they are for ever on the move in leisurely search of variety. (403) (he’s talking about a female pod of whales)
    
    

58. Like venerable moss-bearded Daniel Boone, he will have no one near him but Nature himself; and her he takes to wife in the wilderness of waters, and the best of wives she is, though she keeps os many moody secrets. (404)
    
    

59. Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze! All the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands and looking up into their eyes sentimentally, as much as to say,—oh! My dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round … let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness” (426) (he’s talking about spermaceti lol not the other kind)
    
    

60. As its name imports, it is of an exceedingly rich, mottled tint, with a bestreaked snowy and golden ground, dotted with spots of the deepest crimson and purple. It is plums of rubies, in pictures of citron. (428)
    
    

61. It is called slobgollion; an appellation original with the whalemen, and even so is the nature of the substance. (428) (Petition to call our AI-infested feeds “slopgollion”)
    
    

62. Toes are scarce among veteran blubber-room men. (429)
    
    

63. For hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world’s vast bulk its small but valuable sperm … when—there 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. (439)
    
    

64. Comparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of buffalo … with their thunder-clotted brows upon the sites of populous river-capitals … (470)
    
    

65. Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. (475) (I mean, oh my GOD)
    
    

66. Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head. (485)
    
    

67. He was an old man, who, at the age of nearly sixty, had postponed encountered that thing in sorrow’s technicals called ruin. (492)
    
    

68. …when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin … (498) (I just love the idea of “the ocean’s skin”!)
    
    

69. …when all the spearings of the crimson fight were done: and floating in the lovely sunset sea and sky, sun and whale both stilly died together … (502)
    
    

70. …the pensive air was transparently pure and soft, with a woman’s look, and the robust and man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson’s chest in his sleep. (543)
    
    

71. But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. (546)
    
    

72. …his entire dazzling hump was distinctly visible, sliding along the sea as if an isolated thing, and continually set in a revolving ring of finest, fleecy, greenish foam. (549)
    
    

73. Here’s food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; that’s tingling enough for mortal man! (565)
    
    

74. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains bet too much for that. (565)
    

What a book. What a mind. Madness indeed!