001 Loomings

"It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all." (5)
"...I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs..." (5)

003 The Spouter-Inn

"On one side hung a very large oil-painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal cross-lights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose. such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry, you at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might not be altogether unwarranted.

But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through. - It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale. - It's the unnatural combat of the four primal elements. - It's a blasted heath. - It's a Hyperborean winter scene. - It's the breaking- up of the ice-bound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture's midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great Leviathan himself?

In fact, the artist's design seemed this: a final theory of my own, partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with whom I conversed upon the subject. The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering there with its three dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads." (13-14)

006 The Street

"...all these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea." (37)

007 The Chapel

"...and there these silent islands of men and women sat steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets..." (39)
"Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance." (42)

009 The Sermon (book of Jonah)

"The air is close, and Jonah gasps. Then, in that contracted hole, sunk, too, beneath the ship's waterline, Jonah feels the heralding presentiment of that stifling hour, when the whatle shall hold him in that smallest of his bowel's wards." (50)

010 Bosom Friend

"I'll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy."

013 Wheelbarrow

"...how I spurned that turnpike earth! - that common highway all over dented with the marks of slavish heels and hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity of the sea which will permit no records." (66)

016 The Ship

017 The Ramadan

"...and Heaven have mercy on us all - Presbyterians and Pagans alike - for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending." (90)

019 The Prophet

022 Merry Christmas

"...and blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic." (115)

023 The Lee Shore

"Know ye, now, Bulkington? Glimses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?" (116-117)

024 The Advocate

"...among people at large, the business of whaling is not accounted on a level with what are called the liberal professions. (118)
"But, though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it unwittingly pay us the profoundest homage..." (119)

027 Knights and Squires

"Herein it is the same with the American whale fishery as with the American army and military and merchant navies, and the engineering forces employed in the construction of the American Canals and Railroads. The same, I say, because in all these cases the native American liberally provides the brains, the rest of the world as generously supplying the muscles. No small number of these whaling seamen belong to the Azores, where the outward bound Nantucket whalers frequently touch to augment their crews from the hardy peasants of those rocky shores... How it is, there is no telling, but Islanders seem to make the best whalemen. They were nearly all Islanders in the Pequod, Isolatoes too, I call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own. Yet now, federated along one keel, what a set these Isolatoes were!"(131)

032 Cetology

"It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera, that I would now fain put before you. Yet is it no easy task. The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed." (145)
"I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty... My object here is simply to project the draught of a systematization of cdetology, I am the architect, not the builder." (147)
"God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught - nay, but the draught of a draught." (157)

035 The Mast-Head

"Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but sorry guard." (171)
"And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who offers to ship with the Phaedon instead of Bowditch in his head." (172)
"...but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep , blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature..." (172-173)
"But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch, slip your hold at all; and your identity come back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover." (173)

037 Sunset

"I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, wher'er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass." (Ahab sitting alone. 182)

040 Midnight, Forecastle

"The squall! The squall! jump, my jollies!" (193)

041 Moby Dick

"The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them..."(200)
"How it was that they so aboundingly responded to the old man's ire - by what evil magic their souls were possessed, that at times his hate seemed almost theirs; the White Whale as much their insufferable foe as his; how all this came to be - what the White Whale was to them, or how their unconscious understandings, also, in some dim, unsuspected way, he might have seemed the gliding great demon of the seas of life, - all this to explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go." (203)

042 The Whiteness of the Whale

"Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows - a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?" (212)

044 The Chart

045 The Affidavit

"I care not to perform this part of my task methodically; but shall be content to produce the desired impression by separate citations of items, practically or reliably known to me as a whaleman; and from these citations, I take it - the conclusion aimed at will naturally follow of itself." (221)

047 The Mat-Maker

"...it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates." (233)

054 The Town-Ho's Story

055 Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales

"...the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last."

060 The Line

"...so the graceful repose of the line, as it silently serpentines about the oarsmen before being brought into actual play - this is a thing which carries more of true terror than any other aspect of this dangerous affair. But why say more? All men live enveloped in whale-lines."

081 The Pequod meets the Virgin

082 The Honor and Glory of Whaling

"There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method." (395)

087 The Grand Armada

"...Yes, we were now in that enchanted calm which they say lurks at the heart of every commotion. And still in the distracted distance we beheld the tumults of the outer concentric circles, and saw successive pods of whales, eight or ten in each, swiftly going round and round, like multiplied spans of horses in a ring; and so closely shoulder to shoulder, that a Titanic circus-rider might easily have over-arched the middle ones, and so have gone round on their backs. Owing to the density of the crowd of reposing whales, more immediately surrounding the embayed axis of the herd, no possible chance of escape was at present afforded us. We must watch for a breach in the living wall that hemmed us in; the wall that had only admitted us in order to shut us up. Keeping at the centre of the lake, we were occasionally visited by small tame cows and calves; the women and children of this routed host.
Now, inclusive of the occasional wide intervals between the revolving outer circles, and inclusive of the spaces between the various pods in any one of those circles, the entire area at this juncture, embraced by the whole multitude, must have contained at least two or three square miles. At any rate - though indeed such a test at such a time might be deceptive - spoutings might be discovered from our low boat that seemed playing up almost from the rim of the horizon. I mention this circumstance, because, as if the cows and calves had been purposely locked up in this innermost fold; and as if the wide extent of the herd had hitherto prevented them from learning the precise cause of its stopping; or, possibly, being so young, unsophisticated, and every way innocent and inexperienced; however it may have been, these smaller whales - now and then visiting our becalmed boat from the margin of the lake - evinced a wondrous fearlessness and confidence, or else a still becharmed panic which it was impossible not to marvel at. Like household dogs they came snuffling round us, right up to our gunwales, and touching them; till it almost seemed that some spell had suddenly domesticated them. Queequeg patted their foreheads; Starbuck scratched their backs with his lance; but fearful of the consequences, for the time refrained from darting it.

But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers. The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent; and as human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence; - even so did the young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulf-weed in their new-born sight. floating on their sides, the mothers also seemed quietly eyeing us. One of these little infants, that from certain queer tokens seemed hardly a day old, might have measured some fourteen feet in length, and some six feet in girth. He was a little frisky; though as yet his body seemed scarce yet recovered from that irksome position it had so lately occupied in the maternal reticule; where, tail to head, and all ready for the final spring, the unborn whale lies bent like a Tartar's bow. The delicate side- fins, and the palms of his flukes, still freshly retained the plaited crumpled appearance of a baby's ears newly arrived from foreign parts." (423-424)

091 The Pequod meets the Rose-bud

093: The Castaway

"The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God!" (453)
"He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad." (454)
('coral insects,' pip falls)

099 The Doubloon

"But one morning, turning to pass the doubloon, he seemed to be newly attracted by the strange figures and inscriptions stamped on it, as though now for the first time beginning to interpret for himself in some monomaniac way whatever significance might lurk in them." (470)

102 The Bower in the Arsacides

"The skeleton dimensions I shall not proceed to set down are copied verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving such valuable statistics. But I was crowded for space, and wished the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was hten composing..."
green, skeleton (lecture)

107 The Carpenter

"He was a pure manipulator; his brain, if he had ever had one, must have early oozed along into the muscles of his fingers." (510)

110 Queequeg in his Coffin

"Many spare hours he spent, in carving the lid with all manner of grotesque figures and drawings; and it seemed that hereby he was striving, in his rude way, to copy parts of the twisted tattooing on his body. And this tattooing, had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last." (524)

115 The Pequod meets the Bachelor

118 The Quadrant

"The sky looks lacquered; clouds there are none; the horizon floats; and this nakedness of unrelieved radiance is as the insufferable splendors of God's throne." (543)

121 Midnight - The Forecastle Bulwarks

"I wonder, Flask, whether the world is anchored anywhere..." (555)

128 The Pequod meets the Rachel

131 The Pequod meets the Delight

132 The Symphony

"It was a clear steel-blue day."

133 The Chase - First Day

134 The Chase - Second Day

"Ah! how they still strove through that infinite blueness to seek out the thing that might destroy them!"

135 The Chase - Third Day