“But the past is passed; why moralize upon it? Forget it. See, yon bright son has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves.
Because they have no memory . . . because they are not human.”
― Herman Melville, quote from Benito Cereno
“This slavery breeds ugly passions in man.”
― Herman Melville, quote from Benito Cereno
“The morning was one peculiar to that coast. Everything was mute and calm; everything gray. The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter's mould. The sky seemed a gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors among which they were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms. Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.”
― Herman Melville, quote from Benito Cereno
“the king of kind hearts and polite fellows”
― Herman Melville, quote from Benito Cereno
“His mind swarmed with superstitious suspicions.”
― Herman Melville, quote from Benito Cereno
“images far swifter than these sentences”
― Herman Melville, quote from Benito Cereno
“all was eclipsed in sinister muteness”
― Herman Melville, quote from Benito Cereno
“But, in fact, his reserve might, in some degree, have proceeded from design. If so, then here was evinced the unhealthy climax of that icy though conscientious policy, more or less adopted by all commanders of large ships, which, except in signal emergencies, obliterates alike the manifestation of sway with every trace of sociality; transforming the man into a block, or rather into a loaded cannon, which, until there is call for thunder, has nothing to say. Viewing”
― Herman Melville, quote from Benito Cereno
Herman Melville
Born place: in New York City, New York, The United States
Born date August 1, 1819
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“Thinking about anything interesting?”
I shrug and force my brain to stay with safer topics. “I didn’t know you could feed a baby Thai food.”
Babydoll shovels a handful of shredded food into her mouth and swings her legs happily. She talks with her mouth full and half falls out. “Ah-da-da-da-da-da.” There’s a noodle in her hair, and Kristin reaches out to pull it free.
Geoff scoops some coconut rice onto his plate and tops it with a third serving of beef. “What do you think they feed babies in Thailand?”
I aim a chopstick in his direction. “Point.”
Rev smiles. “Some kid in Bangkok is probably watching his mom tear up a hamburger, saying ‘I didn’t know you could feed a baby American food.’”
“Well,” says Geoff. “Culturally—”
“It was a joke”
― Brigid Kemmerer, quote from Letters to the Lost
“The simple things are also the most extraordinary things, and only the wise can see them.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Alkimist
“The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.”
― Robert Hughes, quote from The Shock of the New
“General admission for groundlings—those who stood in the open around the stage—was a penny. Those who wished to sit paid a penny more, and those who desired a cushion paid another penny on top of that—all this at a time when a day’s wage was 1 shilling (12 pence) or less a day. The money was dropped into a box, which was taken to a special room for safekeeping—the box office.”
― Bill Bryson, quote from Shakespeare: The World as Stage
“„– Będę czujny – westchnął. – Ale nie sądzę, żeby twój wytrawny gracz był w stanie mnie zaskoczyć. Nie po tym, co ja tu przeszedłem. Rzucili się na mnie szpiedzy, opadły wymierające gady i gronostaje. Nakarmiono mnie nie istniejącym kawiorem. Nie gustujące w mężczyznach nimfomanki podawały w wątpliwość moją męskość, groziły gwałtem na jeżu, straszyły ciążą, ba, nawet orgazmem, i to takim, któremu nie towarzyszą rytualne ruchy. Brrr...
- Piłeś?”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, quote from Time of Contempt
The Shift: Taking Yo...
The Wild Things
Beachcombers
The Soldier's Wife
One Night with a Her...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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