Melville Quotes

• Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today. Let me repeat that: Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today! I mean it. Shakespeare was a better stylist, Melville was more important to American letters, and Charles Dickens had a defter hand at creating characters. But among living writers, there is nobody who can even approach Gene Wolfe for brilliance of prose, clarity of thought, and depth in meaning

  Michael Swanwick

  Character, Mean, Hands

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• Art has always been my salvation. And my gods are Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Mozart. I believe in them with all my heart. And when Mozart is playing in my room, I am in conjunction with something I can’t explain — I don’t need to. I know that if there’s a purpose for life, it was for me to hear Mozart. Or if I walk in the woods and I see an animal, the purpose of my life was to see that animal. I can recollect it, I can notice it. I’m here to take note of. And that is beyond my ego, beyond anything that belongs to me, an observer, an observer.

  Maurice Sendak

  Art, Believe, Animal

  "Now" with Bill Moyers, www.pbs.org. March 12, 2004.

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• Whether one becomes famous or not, you have to be reminded of people like Melville, who for the last thirty years of his life was completely unknown. He worked in a customs house and walked off to work as an anonymous person in this American culture.

  Frederic Tuten

  Years, People, House

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I'm able to be a normal mom for the most part. I'm in [clothing store] Brandy Melville like all the other moms.

  Gwyneth Paltrow

  Mom, Able, Normal

  Source: www.harpersbazaar.com

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• There is always something of the writer in the work but I don't think Melville had to be swallowed by a whale to write a great novel. If I had lived the lives of all the characters of the songs I've written, that would truly be an extraordinary story.

  Michael Stipe

  Song, Writing, Character

  2001 In the Daily Telegraph, 20 Oct.

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• We go to sea repeatedly from Melville's time on - and the image of men at sea, like the image of men in the wilderness, seems to me to be almost an archetypal image of human beings on their own, human beings making their own way, guiding themselves by the stars they can see - rather than by faith or prayer or invisible forces.

  Maxine Greene

  Stars, Prayer, Men

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• Updike's style is an exquisite blend of Melville and Austen: reading him is like cutting through whale blubber with embroidery scissors.

  Florence King

  Reading, Cutting, Whales

  Florence King (1990). “Reflections In A Jaundiced Eye”, p.168, Macmillan

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• The bible is very resonant. It has everything, creation, betrayal, lust, poetry, prophecy, sacrifice. All great things are in the bible and all great writers have drawn from it and more than people realise, whether Shakespeare, Herman Melville or Bob Dylan. Of course there are stories that are still relevant and inspiring; lessons that need to be taught over and over again. And they give people hope.

  Patti Smith

  Betrayal, Sacrifice, People

  Source: www.independent.co.uk

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• I am not a religious person, nor do I have any regrets. The war took care of that for me. You know, I was brought up strictly kosher, but I - it made no sense to me. It made no sense to me what was happening. So nothing of it means anything to me. Nothing. Except these few little trivial things that are related to being Jewish. ... You know who my gods are, who I believe in fervently? Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson - she's probably the top - Mozart, Shakespeare, Keats. These are wonderful gods who have gotten me through the narrow straits of life.

  Maurice Sendak

  Religious, Regret, War

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• We are befouling and destroying our own home, we are committing a slow but accelerating race suicide and life murder - planetary biocide. Now there is a mighty theme for a mighty book but a challenge to which no modern novelist or poet has yet responded. Where is our Melville, our Milton, our Thomas Mann when we need him most?

  Edward Abbey

  Suicide, Book, Home

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• I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don't get hay fever in New England either.

  John Updike

  Real, Past, Hay Fever

  London Observer, March 25, 1979.

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• Here we observe the basic obsessive fantasy of Žižek's position: do nothing, sit still, prefer not to, like Melville's Bartleby, and silently dream of a ruthless violence, a consolidation of state power into one man's hands, an act of brutal physical force of which you are the object or the subject or both at once.

  Simon Critchley

  Dream, Men, Hands

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• Melville had to fight, fight against the existing world, against his own very self. Only he would never quite put the knife in the heart of his paradisal ideal. Somehow, somewhere, somewhen, love should be a fulfillment, and life should be a thing of bliss. That was his fixed ideal. Fata Morgana. That was the pin he tortured himself on, like a pinned-down butterfly.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Heart, Butterfly, Fighting

  D.H. Lawrence (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)”, p.8283, Delphi Classics

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• The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me.

  Harold Bloom

  Writing, Class, Ideas

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• As Herman Melville wrote of that seagoing monster of a man Captain Ahab, “All mortal greatness is but disease.

  Nathaniel Philbrick

  Greatness, Men, Ahab

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• The great American writer Herman Melville says somewhere in The White Whale that a man ought to be 'a patriot to heaven,' and I believe it is a good thing, this ambition to be a cosmopolitan, this idea to be citizens not of a small parcel of the world that changes according to the currents of politics, according to the wars, to what occurs, but to feel that the whole world is our country.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Country, War, Believe

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• Or why you are wearing a picture of Santa Clause on you shirts, but-” “It’s Herman Melville.

  Daniel Handler

  Santa, Shirts, Clauses

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• Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited or restricted canvases. These are the children of the gods.

  Ray Bradbury

  Children, Thinking, Wind

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• IN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION: WHAT SCENES ONE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE FILMED Shakespeare in the part of the King's Ghost. The beheading of Louis the Sixteenth, the drums drowning his speech on the scaffold. Herman Melville at breakfast, feeling a sardine to his cat. Poe's wedding. Lewis Carroll's picnics. The Russians leaving Alaska, delighted with the deal. Shot of a seal applauding.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Kings, Cat, Alaska

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• In many college English courses the words “myth” and “symbol” are given a tremendous charge of significance. You just ain’t no good unless you can see a symbol hiding, like a scared gerbil, under every page. And in many creative writing course the little beasts multiply, the place swarms with them. What does this Mean? What does that Symbolize? What is the Underlying Mythos? Kids come lurching out of such courses with a brain full of gerbils. And they sit down and write a lot of empty pomposity, under the impression that that’s how Melville did it.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Kids, Writing, Mean

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• Herman Melville is not comforting. Emily Dickinson isn’t either. Maybe their work is too hungry for comfort, or just too vivid for comfort. But Henry James is – profoundly so. Because he is tender. The tenderness is there in the structure of the sentence. He knows the way the poor and the dead are forgotten by the living, and he cannot allow that to happen. So he keeps on writing for them, for the dead, as if they were children to be sheltered and loved, never abandoned.

  Susan Howe

  Children, Writing, Comforting

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• Man's deliberate destruction of his own habitat -- planet Earth -- could serve as a mighty theme for a mighty book worthy of a modern Melville or Tolstoy. But our best fictioneers confine themselves to domestic drama -- soap opera with literary trimmings.

  Edward Abbey

  Drama, Book, Men

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.48, RosettaBooks

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• Herman Melville said that artists have to take a dive and either you hit your head on a rock and you split your skull and you die … or that blow to the head is so inspiring that you come back and do the best work that you ever did. BUT you have to take the dive and you do not know what the results will be.

  Maurice Sendak

  Artist, Blow, Rocks

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• Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

  Edward Dahlberg

  Atlantis, Literature, Earth

  Edward Dahlberg (1967). “Alms for Oblivion”, U of Minnesota Press

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• You know who my gods are, who I believe in fervently? Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson - she's probably the top - Mozart, Shakespeare, Keats. These are wonderful gods who have gotten me through the narrow straits of life.

  Maurice Sendak

  Believe, Wonderful, Knows

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