Moby-Dick

• "Call me Ishmael. Some years ago —never mind how long precisely —having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. "

The Spouter-Inn (3)

• "Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian."

The Quarter-Deck (36)

• "All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event —in the living act, the undoubted deed —there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?"

Moby-Dick (41)

• "All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it."

The Whiteness of The Whale (42)

• "What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid."

Epilogue

• "The drama's done. Why then here does any one step forth? —Because one did survive the wreck."

• "On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan."