A Quote by Edward Dahlberg

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

Edward Dahlberg

Quote Topics

Atlantis Been Civilized Earth Great Great People Literature Lost Melville Said Separated

Quote Author

Edward Dahlberg
American - Novelist
July 22, 1900 - February 27, 1977

The Bible is very resonant. It has everything: creation, betrayal, lust, poetry, prophecy, sacrifice. All great things are in the Bible, and all great writers have drawn from it and more than people realise, whether Shakespeare, Herman Melville or Bob Dylan.

Patti Smith

The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me.

Harold Bloom

Or why you are wearing a picture of Santa Clause on you shirts, but-” “It’s Herman Melville.

Daniel Handler

Savage peoples are ruled by passion, civilized peoples by the mind. The difference lies not in the respective natures of savagery and civilization, but in their attendant circumstances, institutions, and so forth. The difference, therefore, does not operate in every sense, but it does in most of them. Even the most civilized peoples, in short, can be fired with passionate hatred for each other.

Carl von Clausewitz

As Herman Melville wrote of that seagoing monster of a man Captain Ahab, “All mortal greatness is but disease.

Nathaniel Philbrick

Justice, sir, is the great interest of man on earth. It is the ligament which holds civilized beings and civilized nations together.

Daniel Webster

The horror genre is vast and full of brilliance. Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Herman Melville, the book of Esther. I'll happily join that list.

Victor LaValle

The bible is very resonant. It has everything, creation, betrayal, lust, poetry, prophecy, sacrifice. All great things are in the bible and all great writers have drawn from it and more than people realise, whether Shakespeare, Herman Melville or Bob Dylan. Of course there are stories that are still relevant and inspiring; lessons that need to be taught over and over again. And they give people hope.

Patti Smith

Herman Melville said that artists have to take a dive and either you hit your head on a rock and you split your skull and you die … or that blow to the head is so inspiring that you come back and do the best work that you ever did. BUT you have to take the dive and you do not know what the results will be.

Maurice Sendak

A people may become great through many means, but there is only one measure by which its greatness is recognized and acknowledged. The final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced.... No people that has produced great literature and art has ever been looked upon by the world as distinctly inferior.

James Weldon Johnson

Said the condor to the preying mantis, we're gonna lose this place just like we lost Atlantis.

Neil Young

Herman Cain was unaware that China is a nuclear power. And I said to myself, 'Hey, Herman, how about making an unwanted advance on a history book?'

David Letterman

The great American writer Herman Melville says somewhere in The White Whale that a man ought to be 'a patriot to heaven,' and I believe it is a good thing, this ambition to be a cosmopolitan, this idea to be citizens not of a small parcel of the world that changes according to the currents of politics, according to the wars, to what occurs, but to feel that the whole world is our country.