“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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“Lot's Wife
And the just man trailed God's messenger,
his huge, light shape devoured the black hill.
But uneasiness shadowed is wife and spoke to her:
'It's not too late, you can look back still
At the red towers of Sodom, the place that bore you,
the square in which you sang, the spinning-shed,
at the empty windows of that upper storey
where children blessed your happy marriage-bed.'
Her eyes that were still turning when a bolt
of pain shot through them, were instantly blind;
her body turned into transparent salt,
and her swift legs were rooted to the ground.
Who mourns one woman in a holocaust?
Surely her death has no significance?
Yet in my heart she never will be lost,
she who gave up her life to steal one glance.
1922-24”
― Anna Akhmatova, quote from Selected Poems
“Nonetheless, writing regularly, inspiration or no, is not a bad way to eventually get into an inspired mood; the plane has to bump along the runway for a while before it finally takes off.”
― quote from The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain
“There’s a hell of a lot you haven’t shared.” “Oh, I’m sorry. Be sure to send out invites to the pot-meets-kettle show you’ll be throwing.” “I’m sensing sarcasm. I think being in Cajun country’s given me some of your voodoo.”
― S.E. Jakes, quote from Long Time Gone
“Yep. The tingle in my groin is unmistakable. I've got the hots for the good reverend. I thought I was going to hell before, but this pretty much cements it.”
― Lisa Desrochers, quote from A Little Too Far
“This girl, this girl, and he a man with a business and a secretary and a house with a furnace and bills and a son and a roof with three shingles and a pretty birdpath made of stone that I sometimes see Mrs.Shaw, her tied back with a scarf, cleaning with a dainty skimmer.
How does this man, a man like this, like any of them, come to walk at night and stand in a girl’s backyard, and then, smoking and looking up, suddenly feel himself helpless to bher bright magic?”
― Megan Abbott, quote from The End of Everything
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