Moby-Dick

"Swerve me? Ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves!"

"I am a sick man; but I am a sound mind; and I mean to live yet."

"He is a monomaniac; and, like all monomaniacs, he is subject to certain periodical fits and starts."

"One touches a live thing, an electrode; and you receive a shock."

"How can I bear to see thee gone, old man?"

"All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it."

"I am the Fates' lieutenant; I act under orders."

"In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here."

"Beware of the man with a fixed purpose."

"Strike through the mask!"

"But thou art my captain and master."

"What is this that we feel in our bones?"

"All the subtle demonism of life and thought is prisoned in the skull."

"I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Cape of Good Hope, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up."

"Not a single limb of him that is not a club; his body is all muscle."

"This is my purpose—this is my desire—this is the fixed purpose of my soul."

"Are you ready? Take the mainmast head!"

"He seemed to me like a man who had tried the world again and again and had lost the respect of both sides."

"Aye, there is something in thee, some unconquerable wilfulness."

"The Sperm Whale of the present day is as much an altered and diminished apparition of the mighty monster as the Hunter or the poacher of the Middle Ages."

"I feel as though I am but a speck in this vast blue immensity."

"There was something unreal about every outline of the scene before me."

"Where can it be that this green barnacled old man has been these three years, and no other tidings of him save by chance report."

"I feel as though I am the instrument of some unseen power."

"Madness maddened! That wild madness that's only calm to comprehend itself!"

"The great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last."

"He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength with an inscrutable malice sinewing it."

"I now demand that ye do the duty of the seamen."

"Prophecies are all fulfilled ere men can compass them."

"Aye, aye! and I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Cape of Good Hope, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up."