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Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smalle...more

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A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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Now, as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this conventional world of ours - watery or otherwise; that when a person placed in command over h...more

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whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, an...more

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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,...more

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...then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed th...more

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Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.

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The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating them, till they are left...more

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All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.

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Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath t...more

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But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay br...more

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But though, to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the seas have ever regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and repelling; though we ...more

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Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am th...more

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[T]hen all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

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In one word, Queequeg, said I, rather digressively; hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through the...more