Herman Melville - Moby-Dick (1851)

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There floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.

Herman Melville
Nantucket! … a mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach without a background. Some gamesome wights will tell you that they have to plant weeds there; they don't grow naturally; that pieces of wood in Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true cross in Rome; that one blade of grass makes an oasis, three blades in a day's walk a prairie.

Herman Melville
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.

Herman Melville
Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.

Herman Melville
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.

Herman Melville
See with what entire freedom the whaleman takes his handful of lamps-often but old bottles and vials, though.... He burns, too, the purest of oil.... It is sweet as early grass butter in April. He goes and hunts for his oil, so as to be sure of its freshness and genuineness, even as the traveler on the prairie hunts up his own supper of game.

Herman Melville
An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea.

Herman Melville