Remembering Herman Melville. 20 great phrases of his works

Herman Melville meet today 199 years. And its bicentennial next year promises to be a big celebration. This American writer, considered one of the greats of world literature, is undoubtedly fundamental reference of the adventure novel, especially those developed in the Mars, with a strong and intense psychological component.

Today I bring 20 phrases selected from his most prominent works. For those of us who love genre books and everything that smells like sea, ships and great epics, the author of the immortal white whale Moby Dick is a must have.

Who was Herman Melville

With a life as intense as his novels, Melville was born in New York and he was the third of eight children. When his father, Allan Melville, passed away, the family was in dire financial straits. Thus, in 1837 he crossed the ocean to Liverpool where he was working. Upon his return he served as professor and in 1841, at the age of 22, he traveled to South seas aboard a whaling.

After a year and a half of crossing, he abandoned ship in the Marquesas Islands and lived for a month among cannibals, of which he escaped in an Australian merchant ship to disembark in Tahiti, where he spent some time in prison. He also worked as a farmer, traveled to Honolulu and from there, he ended up enlisting in a US Navy frigate.

In 1844, stopped browsing and he devoted himself to writing novels full time and usually based on his experiences at sea. They were titles like Typee, Mardi or Redburn, among others. Or as Billy Budd, the sailor, a last work published when Melville had almost fallen into oblivion. Other titles were Pierre, a great failure, and Tales from the viewpoint, which contains the account of Bartleby the clerk.

His most famous novel was Moby Dick, published in 1850, but was rejected at first. Then it became one of the great works of universal literature, for the portrait and metaphor of the world and human nature in a boat, the pequod, captained by one of the greatest characters ever created, Captain ahab. He dedicated it to nathaniel hawthorne, an author who also influenced him a lot and with whom he befriended in 1850.

20 phrases of his works

type (1846)

  1. Poor ship! Your own appearance reflects your wishes; In what deplorable condition it is!
  2. The mountains and the interior present only isolated and silent places to view, devoid of the roars of prey animals and animated by few samples of small beings.
  3. Our ship had surrendered to all kinds of revelries and perversions. Not the slightest barrier was interposed between the profane passions of the crew and their boundless pleasure.
  4. But these reflections rarely occupied my mind; I would abandon myself as the hours passed, and if ever unpleasant thoughts came over me, I would quickly dismiss them. When I admired the green enclosure in which I was imprisoned, I was inclined to think that I was in a "valley of dreams" and that beyond the mountains there was only a world of anxiety and worry.
  5. In search of the whale we had been sailing through the Equator about twenty degrees west of the Galapagos; and all our work, after determining our course, was to adjust the yards and stay downwind: the good boat and the constant breeze would do the rest.

Moby Dick (1851)

  1. You can call me Ismael.
  2. Human insanity is often a cunning and feline thing. When it is thought that it has fled, perhaps it has only transfigured itself in some silent and more subtle way.
  3. By some curious fatality, as is often noted in the city filibusters who always camp around the courthouses, equally, gentlemen, sinners tend to abound in the most sacred surroundings.
  4. It is not on any map. Real places never are.
  5. The future trail of the animal through the darkness is almost as established for the hunter's shrewd mind as the shoreline for the pilot. So it was this prodigious skill of the hunter, the proverbial transience of a thing written in the water, a wake, is as trustworthy, for all desired purposes, as dry land.

Bartleby, the clerk (1853)

  1. I must say that, according to the custom of many lawmen with offices in densely populated buildings, the door had several keys.
  2. Ah, happiness seeks the light, that is why we judge that the world is happy; but pain hides in loneliness, that is why we judge that pain does not exist.
  3. But he seemed alone, absolutely alone in the universe. Something like a spoil in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
  4. I could give alms to her body; but his body didn't hurt; his soul was sick, and I couldn't reach his soul.
  5. It is not uncommon for the man who is contradicted in an unusual and unreasonable way abruptly disbelieves of his most elementary conviction. He begins to dimly glimpse that, extraordinary as it may seem, all justice and all reason are on the other side; if there are impartial witnesses, he turns to them for some way to reinforce him.

Billy Budd, the sailor (1924)

  1. Uncompromisingly told truth will always have its rugged sides.
  2. In fact, he was one of those sea wolves for whom the hardships and dangers of naval life, in those times of prolonged warfare, had never spoiled the natural instinct for the enjoyment of the senses.
  3. This captain was one of those valuable mortals found in all kinds of professions, even the humblest; the kind of person everyone agrees to call "a respectable man."
  4. When war is declared, are we, the combatants in charge of it, previously consulted? We fight by following orders. If our judgment approves the war, it is mere coincidence.
  5. Who in the rainbow can draw the line where purple ends and orange begins? We clearly see the difference in colors, but where, exactly, does the first one get confused with the second? The same is true of mental health and insanity.

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