A Quote by Gavin O'Connor
The thing about Moby Dick is that, at heart, it's a very simple plot - there's only one white whale in the ocean. When you're a boy growing up in a hostile home, you imagine it's unique: it's happening only to you.
Related Quotes
I'd like to play the whale in 'Moby Dick.' If I keep eating, I may end up getting there.
No highbrow literary type would ever say 'Moby Dick' is good but it's just about a whale, or a Jane Austen would be important if she wasn't just writing about romantic relationships.
Growing up in Hawaii, the ocean is where I'm most at home. When I'm away from it and landlocked I long for the ocean. There's something about it, I'm at peace with it.
Instead of being a page-turner, 'Moby-Dick' is a repository of American history and culture and the essentials of Western literature. The book is so encyclopedic that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the midst of the 19th century.
The ocean is a place of paradoxes. It is the home of the great white shark, two-thousand-pound killer of the seas, and of the hundred-foot blue whale, the largest animal that ever lived. It is also the home of living things so small that your two hands might scoop up as many of them as there are stars in the Milky Way.
I can't imagine dating a boy, meeting him only outside the home. What's a home and family for if it's not the center of one's life?
I think people have the wrong idea of 'Moby Dick' as this somber, boring thing.
I walk outside and scream at the top of my lungs, and it maybe travels two blocks. A whale unleashes his cry, and it travels hundreds or even thousands of miles. Every whale in the ocean will at one time or another run into that song. And I figure whales probably don't edit. If they think it, they say it...Whale talk is the truth, and in a very short period of time, if you're a whale, you know exactly what it is to be you.
Even though I hadn't read a word of it, I grew up hating 'Moby-Dick.'
More than 25 miles off the coast of Massachusetts and only 14 miles long, Nantucket is, as Herman Melville wrote in 'Moby-Dick,' 'away off shore.'
When I go on vacation, I take very few clothes and a whole lot of books. It's the most soothing thing in the world. Reading 'Moby-Dick' is like being in a time machine. I almost feel as excited as the first time I read it and I always find something new.
There was no magic encounter for me with a whale in the ocean; no being zapped by a whale as I snorkelled in their world. Nothing visible or capable of explanation. In fact, I'd never seen a whale. When I first witnessed their terrible death agony, I couldn't get the picture of a whale being harpooned out of my mind. It was a hideous mind-blowing sight. That day I recognised a purpose on the journey of my life.
One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.
Fiction writers come up with some interesting metaphors when speaking of plot. Some say the plot is the highway and the characters are the automobiles. Others talk about stories that are "plot-driven," as if the plot were neither the highway nor the automobile, but the chauffeur. Others seem to have plot phobia and say they never plot. Still others turn up their noses at the very notion, as if there's something artificial, fraudulent, contrived.
I have been growing vegetables since I was a boy. When I was about 17 I was the only one of five children living at home. My parents were ill and I took over the vegetable garden and I have had one ever since.
The simple fact of yourself... there it is... just you... no excitement about it... a very simple fact... the only thing you have... keep it as clear as you can.
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