The strangest Moby-Dick quotes are not the ones about the whale’s malice. They are the ones where Melville stops the voyage to argue that a whale is a fish, to preach a sermon to sharks, or to squeeze a tub of whale wax until he loves everyone on deck. Below are thirteen of the oddest sentences in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, each copied from the Project Gutenberg text, with its chapter and what Melville is up to.
The book announces its oddness before the story starts. Ahead of chapter 1 come an “Etymology”, credited to a late consumptive usher to a grammar school, and pages of “Extracts” about whales gathered by a sub-sub-librarian. Several famous lines have already had their turn on this site, in book quotes about the sea and the strangest sentences in classic literature, so none of them is repeated here.
Moby-Dick quotes from the cetology chapters
1. The whale is a fish
Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter 32, “Cetology”
Ishmael has just quoted Linnaeus, who separated whales from fish, and he waves him away. His evidence is the Bible. In the very next sentence he admits the difference anyway: whales have lungs and warm blood, while other fish are lungless and cold blooded. He knows, and he refuses, and that is the whole comic engine of the cetology chapters.
2. The draught of a draught
God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter 32, “Cetology”
This closes the chapter in which Ishmael tries to classify every whale, sorting them like books into Folio, Octavo and Duodecimo whales. The system collapses, and instead of apologising he prays to stay unfinished. That last line reads as if Melville had dropped out of the narrator and was talking about his own desk.
3. A fish found in the bowels
Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale!
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter 92, “Ambergris”
Ambergris was used in perfume, and the chapter notes that some wine merchants dropped a few grains into claret. Melville enjoys the social joke: the best scents in the drawing room come out of a whale’s indigestion. He goes on to suggest curing the dyspepsia with three or four boat loads of Brandreth’s pills, a patent medicine of the day, then running away.
4. He has no face
Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will. But if I know not even the tail of this whale, how understand his head? much more, how comprehend his face, when face he has none?
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter 86, “The Tail”
A whole chapter of loving anatomy ends in a confession of failure. Ishmael then puts an echo of Exodus in the whale’s mouth, God’s warning to Moses that his back may be seen but not his face: Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen.
5. Write on the flea
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 who have tried it.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter 104, “The Fossil Whale”
This is Melville boasting about his subject while laughing at himself for boasting. The next paragraph offers his credentials as a geologist: he has been a stone-mason and a great digger of ditches. It is a writer’s manifesto delivered in the middle of a chapter on fossils.
Strange Moby-Dick quotes from the Pequod’s crew
6. Strike the sun
Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter 36, “The Quarter-Deck”
Starbuck has just protested that it is madness to take vengeance on a dumb brute. Ahab’s answer is that the whale may be only a mask over something worse, and that he will hit whatever is behind it. Grief has turned into a theology in which the universe owes him an apology.
7. The universe as a practical joke
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter 49, “The Hyena”
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Ishmael has just been tipped out of a whaleboat in a squall and fished out of the sea. His response is to go below and make his will. The chapter is called “The Hyena” because that is the laugh he has in mind, and it is one of the best descriptions in fiction of the giddy calm that follows a narrow escape.
8. A sermon to the sharks
You is sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de shark in you, why den you be angel; for all angel is not’ing more dan de shark well goberned.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter 64, “Stubb’s Supper”
Stubb wants a whale steak at midnight and orders old Fleece, the cook, to lean over the side with a lantern and tell the sharks feeding on the carcass to keep the noise down. Fleece obeys, then gives up on them as hopeless. The comedy is broad, but the theology in that one sentence is the most serious in the chapter.
9. Squeeze
Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter 94, “A Squeeze of the Hand”
The “sperm” is spermaceti, the waxy oil from the whale’s head, which cools into lumps that the crew squeeze back into liquid. Ishmael turns the chore into a hymn to brotherhood: let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.
Melville knew exactly how it sounded, and the sentence is both a joke and his most tender picture of the crew.
10. I look, you look
I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter 99, “The Doubloon”
Ahab has nailed a gold coin to the mainmast as a reward for whoever first sights the white whale. One by one the crew stop to read it as a symbol: Ahab, Starbuck, Stubb, Flask, the old Manxman, Queequeg. Then Pip, the boy who lost his wits in the sea, comes up and conjugates a verb at it. Stubb thinks he has been studying Murray’s Grammar. It is the best reading of the coin in the chapter: everyone sees only himself.
11. The whiteness
It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be naught.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter 42, “The Whiteness of the Whale”
A chapter-long essay on a colour, placed in the middle of an adventure story. Ishmael runs through marbles, pearls, albatrosses and polar bears, trying to explain why white strikes more panic into him than the redness of blood. The admission that he may fail is part of the effect: the dread is real precisely because it will not resolve into an argument.
The coffin and the end
12. A life-buoy of a coffin
A life-buoy of a coffin! Does it go further? Can it be that in some spiritual sense the coffin is, after all, but an immortality-preserver!
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter 127, “The Deck”
The ship’s life-buoy has sunk, and the only spare object that floats is the coffin the carpenter made for Queequeg when he thought he was dying. In chapter 126 Starbuck has it rigged as the new buoy. Ahab, watching the carpenter hammer, finds the symbol too neat to trust and goes below. The reader should remember it: in the Epilogue, that coffin is what keeps Ishmael afloat.
13. Five thousand years ago
Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter 135, “The Chase.—Third Day.”
After 135 chapters, the Pequod goes down in one sentence, and the sea does not notice. The strangeness is the scale. All that obsession, all those lectures and sermons, and the ocean simply closes over them, as indifferent as it was before Jonah.
Quick reference: Moby-Dick quotes by chapter
| Quote fragment | Speaker | Chapter |
|---|---|---|
| “the whale is a fish” | Ishmael | 32, Cetology |
| “the draught of a draught” | Ishmael | 32, Cetology |
| “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me” | Ahab | 36, The Quarter-Deck |
| “the whiteness of the whale” | Ishmael | 42, The Whiteness of the Whale |
| “a vast practical joke” | Ishmael | 49, The Hyena |
| “de shark well goberned” | Fleece | 64, Stubb’s Supper |
| “when face he has none” | Ishmael | 86, The Tail |
| “inglorious bowels of a sick whale” | Ishmael | 92, Ambergris |
| “Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze!” | Ishmael | 94, A Squeeze of the Hand |
| “I look, you look, he looks” | Pip | 99, The Doubloon |
| “written on the flea” | Ishmael | 104, The Fossil Whale |
| “A life-buoy of a coffin!” | Ahab | 127, The Deck |
| “the great shroud of the sea” | Narrator | 135, The Chase, Third Day |
Melville’s habit of stopping the plot for a lecture has a cousin in Lewis Carroll, whose nonsense is just as rigorous in its own way; see Alice in Wonderland’s oddest lines. For another writer who states the impossible in a level voice, try Kafka’s most unsettling lines.
One last oddity to look for when you read it: the Epilogue opens with a line from Job, AND I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE
, which makes the narrator of the whole book a messenger from a disaster.
Sources
- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (Project Gutenberg #2701), plain text at https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2701/pg2701.txt; all quotations, chapter numbers and chapter titles, the Etymology and Extracts
More to read
- Gogol’s Strangest Sentences: The Nose, The Overcoat and Dead Souls
- Kafka’s Most Unsettling Lines, and Where They Come From
- Alice in Wonderland’s Oddest Lines, Explained
Looking for lines from modern novels? Browse Lucy’s own quote collection.