Moby Dick

“He is a Moby Dick afficionado and collects copies and versions of that and he said that is the best book of all time.”

“it's the the hero or the protagonist doesn't learn from his mistakes and and and holds on Moby Dick is a tragedy because Ahab will not give up on this [ __ ] white”

“The sinking of this ship inspired Herman Melville to write Moby Dick, and what happened was, in I think it was 1821, the whaling industry in Nantucket was so fascinating.”

“I mean, like we tried this; we had a book club and the book club was, you know, we’d read like great works of literature, so we read Moby Dick. Yeah, you were on a deck of a ship, right? Exactly, so we did one with Moby Dick and it’s like I love that stuff, right?”

“He started reciting Moby Dick; the opening to Moby Dick was really striking.”

“You know, I did a course on Moby Dick, Heart of Darkness, Notes from Underground, Death in Venice, and The Plague—all one course. Oh yeah, that's fun.”

“I've always been fascinated by that story; of course, Melville makes a lot of it in Moby Dick. There's a moment in that story that I find particularly compelling, and one of the things I like about the Bible is it will have these little moments of very powerful humanity in the midst of wrestling with the numinous.”

“but Moby Dick barely sold in Herman Melville's Lifetime and only became this iconic work of literature over you know a century”

“I remember when we did the Mandela Pavilion, we read 'Moby Dick,' the whiteness of the whale, the albino, the different, the other. And that got us to work on melanin.”

“I'm getting there. I wrote an academic paper actually about the mathematics in Moby Dick, and that came out in 2021.”

“so there's definitely that there's you know i circle back to moby dick a lot um because we read it in a uh a really great english class i had in high school and i came in with an oppositional stance because i thought that the teacher was going to try to talk me into having all kinds of highfalutin”

“one of many failings is i've never gotten through moby dick or or any of melville's works so maybe can you comment on before we talk about dave or david foster wallace who i have gotten through”

“What was the book? Moby dick”

“um moby dick”

“so and and melville does the same thing in moby dick where he he thinks about will there ever come a time where we run out of whales”

“did you go read moby-dick see how many mahi-mahi they got in that sucker zilch ezel”

“and at this great quote in Herman Melville's moby-dick that says you know Noah's Flood is still happening we are the majority of the earth is still flooded in water these we are connected to these events”

“If you've ever read Moby Dick, you know about the whale that sinks the ship. Yes, there's actually a true story behind it. So Nantucket originally was for Quakers, yeah, were whale men.”

“How many times have you read Moby Dick? I’m 50 years old.”

“I read Moby Dick for the first time at the age of 17. What was your impression on your first reading at 17 years old?”

“I could not believe the book; if it were not for Moby Dick, whaling would be one of a series of interests, but because Moby Dick has loomed so large, I went all in on whaling then, huh?”

“In 1851, he published a novel called The Whale, later retitled Moby Dick or The Whale. At some point, you may have read Moby Dick or pretended to.”

“But as much as I’d like to say that Moby Dick is a book about whaling, I mean, we have been doing this three-part series on the history and economics of whaling, Moby Dick isn't really about whaling.”

“And how about the crew in Moby Dick? The book you love more than anything describes for me the diversity of the crew on the Pequod.”

“The book you love more than anything describes for me the diversity of the crew on the Pequod. The crew of Moby Dick is probably more diverse than any historic whaling ship was.”

“I'm laughing, especially because one of the very funny discourses on Twitter about Moby Dick is that there's a whole kind of subset of Moby Dick-obsessed Twitter, and one of the jokes is about what it means to hate a specific animal.”

“Part of what makes Moby Dick funny in some ways is that there’s a hatred for a specific animal. Can you describe in just a few words what Moby Dick Twitter is like?”

“Well, a lot of it is taking lines from Moby Dick and translating them into popular memes, and so that’s always amusing. Do you have a favorite or two?”

“The distracted boyfriend meme is a common one where the original girlfriend is something like the plot of the novel, and the girl that is distracting the boyfriend—the boyfriend is Melville, and the girl distracting him can be something like minute details about whaling taxonomy. So that kind of meme.”

“It's an outlier only in the sense that it remains widely read today, in part because by naming the whale Moby Dick, I mean, there are so many ways. Melville is like a deeply queer writer; all of his texts have scenes of mutual masturbation or various other queer subtexts.”

“The challenge of reading Moby Dick is having a comfort in not knowing, being someone who can sit with dissatisfaction, or sit with inconclusiveness, sit with discomfort, sit with the idea that things will not be resolved necessarily in the timeframe or the way that you want them to. I don't think everybody's comfortable with that.”

“So if you could go back to your 17-year-old self, and maybe when you first read it and fell in love with it, but then tack onto your 17-year-old self your current self with your deeper understanding of the book, how would you describe to your classmates who were not interested in reading Moby Dick, or maybe to the millions”

“Moby Dick is deeply weird and funny, and what it especially does for me, both the 17-year-old me and the 18- or 20-year-olds to whom I teach it now, and to my 50-year-old self who still reads it at least once a year, is that Moby Dick takes any sense that you might have that there is some transcendent, great,”

“The idea that things can be messy is part of the form of Moby Dick's own messiness.”

“But the odds are you will have to seek it out, as Melville writes in Moby Dick: it is not down in any map; true places never are.”

“Also, why is it still a good idea to read Moby Dick? There's a headline early in the novel that says bloody battle in Afghanistan, grand contested election for the presidency of the United States—and is a 19th-century whaling crew more ethnically diverse than your 21st-century office?”

“The Essex was the real-life inspiration for Moby Dick by Herman Melville, the whale of all whaling books.”

“The most famous whale ship disaster was the Essex; just about every kid in America learned the story of this ship that was rammed by a whale and which Melville would use for the climax of Moby Dick.”

“That again is Nathaniel Philbrick; for my money, Moby Dick is America's Bible.”

“The ship in Moby Dick isn't called the Essex; it's called the Pequod.”

“Um, but as far as keeping up, you know, it is a bit of what's a challenge nowadays is to read anything where you think, oh, okay, that's the full story!”

“There's a book called Moby Dick I didn't read it Well that was your first mistake It's real culture number eight If you haven't read M dick That was your first mistake I hear it's an amazing book I've never read it Oh it's fabulous It's a it's really a thriller It's a thrill It's a page Turner but it's”

“and all of this [ __ ] um M dick dick you know listening to Zeppelin It's like I've never read that book So I've just [ __ ] read like one year I read like 20 of them everything from the count of mon Christo The Prince and the popper uh what else did I read Confederacy of Dunces”

“You're asked by your teacher, Professor, you know, what's Moby Dick about? You’ve skimmed the Cliff Notes or Spark Notes; whatever, man versus nature, right?”

“We met and we talked about like Herman Melville and Moby Dick for a really long time.”

“Starting from six tiny stores when Howard took over in 1987, this quirky coffee company named after a character from Moby Dick has scaled to nearly 40,000 locations worldwide.”

“It’s both the greatest time and the worst time ever, right? Yeah, it’s a great time because it feels like an asteroid’s coming, yet the asteroid isn’t here just yet. Well, our mutual friend Sam Harris would argue that the asteroid is actually Donald Trump. Oh, for some people, that’s their white whale.”

“We spoke with economists, historians, a Moby Dick scholar, and an environmental activist whose mission in life is to stop whale hunting.”

“Yeah, I see. Have you read Moby Dick?”

“And what was life like on board the Pequod, the whaling ship in Moby Dick? After the break, we tried to get a feel for that.”

“The whale itself became central to our art and culture. Part of what makes Moby Dick funny is that there's a hatred for a specific animal.”

“I'm gonna go with Sun Also Rises and Moby Dick”

“Is there a way that when they read I don't know Moby Dick is their way It can there be like they turn the page and water squirts at them”