“Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs”

“Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.”

“But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.”

“So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently guided the way of this fire-ship on the sea. Wrapped, for that interval, in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness, the madness, the ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the fiend shapes before me, capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at last begat kindred visions in my soul, so soon as I began to yield to that unaccountable drowsiness which ever would come over me at a midnight helm.”

“all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea”

“Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will.”

“Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air!”