Herman Melville

Moby-Dick (Vintage 2007)

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Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the East reverenced in their statue devil; - Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred White Whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it. (pp 202-3)

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Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world - page 1.

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Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian (p. 27)

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the chambers of my soul are all in crookedness - Preachers story of Jonah in the tilted cabin. (p. 48) 

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because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some part of you must be cold,for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is, merely by contrast. - (p. 59)

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have mercy on this small black boy down here; preserve him from all men that have no bowels to feel fear. (p. 195)

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Paul Keating

"PK said when he was out of office he planned to have an answering machine with the message: 'You have reached the office of ex-prime minister Paul Keating. Now f$&* off and leave me alone',"

"He said Murdoch is a hard bastard and you need a strategy for dealing with him."

"On Murdoch, he told TB: 'He's a big bad bastard, and the only way you can deal with him is to make sure he thinks you can be a big bad bastard too. You can do deals with him, without ever saying a deal is done. But the only thing he cares about is his business and the only language he respects is strength'."

Albert Einstein

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Stephen Jay Gould

An old paleontological in joke proclaims that mammalian evolution is a tale told by teeth mating to produce slightly altered descendent teeth.

Warren Buffett

‘Something bad will happen, but you could go back at anytime in the last 100 years and say the same thing… you can freeze yourself out indefinitely.’
“You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don't do too many things wrong.”
"When someone with experience proposes a deal to someone with money, too often the fellow with money ends up with the experience, and the fellow with experience ends up with the money.”