Herman Melville
Herman Melville
Herman Melvillewas an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period best known for Typee, a romantic account of his experiences in Polynesian life, and his whaling novel Moby-Dick. His work was almost forgotten during his last thirty years. His writing draws on his experience at sea as a common sailor, exploration of literature and philosophy, and engagement in the contradictions of American society in a period of rapid change. He developed a complex, baroque style:...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth1 August 1819
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. ... What I feel most moved to write, that is banned - it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.
It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open.
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it.
A book in a man's brain is better off than a book bound in calf - at any rate it is safer from criticism.
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.
We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with ourfellowmen? and along those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run ascauses, and they come back to us as effects.
We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.
No utter surprise can come to him Who reaches Shakespeare's core; That which we seek and shun is there - Man's final lore
So philosophers so throughly comprehend us as horses.
Miserable man! Oh! most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with slouched hat and guilty eye, skulking from his God; prowling among the shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the seas.
I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I will go to it laughing.
To the last, I grapple with thee; From Hell's heart, I stab at thee; For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee
This, shipmates, this is that other lesson; and woe to that pilot of the living God who slights it.
Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.