All 50 Uses of
Moby-Dick
in
Moby Dick
- Accordingly, the boats now made for her, and were soon swayed up to their cranes——the two parts of the wrecked boat having been previously secured by her——and then hoisting everything to her side, and stacking her canvas high up, and sideways outstretching it with stun-sails, like the double-jointed wings of an albatross; the Pequod bore down in the leeward wake of Moby Dick.†
Chpt 133-135
- "Sway me up, men; ye have been deceived; not Moby Dick casts one odd jet that way, and then disappears."†
Chpt 133-135
- The triumphant halloo of thirty buckskin lungs was heard, as——much nearer to the ship than the place of the imaginary jet, less than a mile ahead——Moby Dick bodily burst into view!†
Chpt 133-135
- "Aye, breach your last to the sun, Moby Dick!" cried Ahab, "thy hour and thy harpoon are at hand!†
Chpt 133-135
- As if to strike a quick terror into them, by this time being the first assailant himself, Moby Dick had turned, and was now coming for the three crews.†
Chpt 133-135
- So with Moby Dick——two days he's floated——tomorrow will be the third.†
Chpt 133-135
- "Forehead to forehead I meet thee, this third time, Moby Dick!†
Chpt 133-135
- "Give way!" cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward to the attack; but maddened by yesterday's fresh irons that corroded in him, Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven.†
Chpt 133-135
- But he looked too nigh the boat; for as if bent upon escaping with the corpse he bore, and as if the particular place of the last encounter had been but a stage in his leeward voyage, Moby Dick was now again steadily swimming forward; and had almost passed the ship,——which thus far had been sailing in the contrary direction to him, though for the present her headway had been stopped.†
Chpt 133-135
- Moby Dick seeks thee not.†
Chpt 133-135 *
- As both steel and curse sank to the socket, as if sucked into a morass, Moby Dick sideways writhed; spasmodically rolled his nigh flank against the bow, and, without staving a hole in it, so suddenly canted the boat over, that had it not been for the elevated part of the gunwale to which he then clung, Ahab would once more have been tossed into the sea.†
Chpt 133-135
Uses with a very rare meaning:
- MOBY DICK; OR THE WHALE by Herman Melville ETYMOLOGY.
Chpt EtymMoby Dick = not tracked in this book
- "Captain Ahab," said Tashtego, "that white whale must be the same that some call Moby Dick."
Chpt 34-36
- "Moby Dick?" shouted Ahab.
Chpt 34-36
- Death and devils! men, it is Moby Dick ye have seen—Moby Dick—Moby Dick!
Chpt 34-36
- Death and devils! men, it is Moby Dick ye have seen—Moby Dick—Moby Dick!
Chpt 34-36
- Death and devils! men, it is Moby Dick ye have seen—Moby Dick—Moby Dick!
Chpt 34-36
- Captain Ahab, I have heard of Moby Dick—but it was not Moby Dick that took off thy leg?
Chpt 34-36
- Captain Ahab, I have heard of Moby Dick—but it was not Moby Dick that took off thy leg?
Chpt 34-36
- "Who told thee that?" cried Ahab; then pausing, "Aye, Starbuck; aye, my hearties all round; it was Moby Dick that dismasted me;"
Chpt 34-36
- Moby Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now.
Chpt 34-36
- "Aye, aye!" shouted the harpooneers and seamen, running closer to the excited old man: "A sharp eye for the white whale; a sharp lance for Moby Dick!"
Chpt 34-36
- But what's this long face about, Mr. Starbuck; wilt thou not chase the white whale? art not game for Moby Dick?
Chpt 34-36
- Drink, ye harpooneers! drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat's bow—Death to Moby Dick!
Chpt 34-36
- God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!
Chpt 34-36
- CHAPTER 41 Moby Dick.
Chpt 40-42
- …many of them adventurously pushing their quest along solitary latitudes, so as seldom or never for a whole twelvemonth or more on a stretch, to encounter a single news-telling sail of any sort; the inordinate length of each separate voyage; the irregularity of the times of sailing from home; all these, with other circumstances, direct and indirect, long obstructed the spread through the whole world-wide whaling-fleet of the special individualizing tidings concerning Moby Dick.
Chpt 40-42
- It was hardly to be doubted, that several vessels reported to have encountered, at such or such a time, or on such or such a meridian, a Sperm Whale of uncommon magnitude and malignity, which whale, after doing great mischief to his assailants, had completely escaped them; to some minds it was not an unfair presumption, I say, that the whale in question must have been no other than Moby Dick.
Chpt 40-42
- Yet as of late the Sperm Whale fishery had been marked by various and not unfrequent instances of great ferocity, cunning, and malice in the monster attacked; therefore it was, that those who by accident ignorantly gave battle to Moby Dick; such hunters, perhaps, for the most part, were content to ascribe the peculiar terror he bred, more, as it were, to the perils of the Sperm Whale fishery at large, than to the individual cause.
Chpt 40-42
- But at length, such calamities did ensue in these assaults—not restricted to sprained wrists and ankles, broken limbs, or devouring amputations—but fatal to the last degree of fatality; those repeated disastrous repulses, all accumulating and piling their terrors upon Moby Dick; those things had gone far to shake the fortitude of many brave hunters, to whom the story of the White Whale had eventually come.
Chpt 40-42
- No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transit over the widest watery spaces, the outblown rumors of the White Whale did in the end incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints, and half-formed foetal suggestions of supernatural agencies, which eventually invested Moby Dick with new terrors unborrowed from anything that visibly appears.
Chpt 40-42
- So that overawed by the rumors and portents concerning him, not a few of the fishermen recalled, in reference to Moby Dick, the earlier days of the Sperm Whale fishery, when it was oftentimes hard to induce long practised Right whalemen to embark in the perils of this new and daring warfare; such men protesting that although other leviathans might be hopefully pursued, yet to chase and point lance at such an apparition as the Sperm Whale was not for mortal man.
Chpt 40-42
- Nevertheless, some there were, who even in the face of these things were ready to give chase to Moby Dick; and a still greater number who, chancing only to hear of him distantly and vaguely, without the specific details of any certain calamity, and without superstitious accompaniments, were sufficiently hardy not to flee from the battle if offered.
Chpt 40-42
- One of the wild suggestions referred to, as at last coming to be linked with the White Whale in the minds of the superstitiously inclined, was the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous; that he had actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time.
Chpt 40-42
- …then, with such prodigies as these; and knowing that after repeated, intrepid assaults, the White Whale had escaped alive; it cannot be much matter of surprise that some whalemen should go still further in their superstitions; declaring Moby Dick not only ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time); that though groves of spears should be planted in his flanks, he would still swim away unharmed; or if indeed he should ever be made to spout thick blood, such a…
Chpt 40-42
- And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab's leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field.
Chpt 40-42
- All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick.
Chpt 40-42
- Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which could not but occasionally awaken in any man's soul some alarm, there was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form.
Chpt 40-42
- So that though Moby Dick had in a former year been seen, for example, on what is called the Seychelle ground in the Indian ocean, or Volcano Bay on the Japanese Coast; yet it did not follow, that were the Pequod to visit either of those spots at any subsequent corresponding season, she would infallibly encounter him there.
Chpt 43-45
- For there and then, for several consecutive years, Moby Dick had been periodically descried, lingering in those waters for awhile, as the sun, in its annual round, loiters for a predicted interval in any one sign of the Zodiac.
Chpt 43-45
- So that Monsoons, Pampas, Nor'-Westers, Harmattans, Trades; any wind but the Levanter and Simoon, might blow Moby Dick into the devious zig-zag world-circle of the Pequod's circumnavigating wake.
Chpt 43-45
- For the peculiar snow-white brow of Moby Dick, and his snow-white hump, could not but be unmistakable.
Chpt 43-45
- So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.
Chpt 43-45
- Though, consumed with the hot fire of his purpose, Ahab in all his thoughts and actions ever had in view the ultimate capture of Moby Dick; though he seemed ready to sacrifice all mortal interests to that one passion; nevertheless it may have been that he was by nature and long habituation far too wedded to a fiery whaleman's ways, altogether to abandon the collateral prosecution of the voyage.
Chpt 46-48
- Not only that, but the subtle insanity of Ahab respecting Moby Dick was noways more significantly manifested than in his superlative sense and shrewdness in foreseeing that, for the present, the hunt should in some way be stripped of that strange imaginative impiousness which naturally invested it; that the full terror of the voyage must be kept withdrawn into the obscure background (for few men's courage is proof against protracted meditation unrelieved by action); that when they…
Chpt 46-48
- Not only that, but the subtle insanity of Ahab respecting Moby Dick was noways more significantly manifested than in his superlative sense and shrewdness in foreseeing that, for the present, the hunt should in some way be stripped of that strange imaginative impiousness which naturally invested it; that the full terror of the voyage must be kept withdrawn into the obscure background (for few men's courage is proof against protracted meditation unrelieved by action); that when they stood their long night watches, his officers and men must have some nearer things to think of than Moby Dick.
Chpt 46-48
- Granting that the White Whale fully incites the hearts of this my savage crew, and playing round their savageness even breeds a certain generous knight-errantism in them, still, while for the love of it they give chase to Moby Dick, they must also have food for their more common, daily appetites.
Chpt 46-48
- But almost everybody supposed that this particular preparative heedfulness in Ahab must only be with a view to the ultimate chase of Moby Dick; for he had already revealed his intention to hunt that mortal monster in person.
Chpt 49-51
- Nor with the immemorial superstition of their race, and in accordance with the preternaturalness, as it seemed, which in many things invested the Pequod, were there wanting some of the seamen who swore that whenever and wherever descried; at however remote times, or in however far apart latitudes and longitudes, that unnearable spout was cast by one self-same whale; and that whale, Moby Dick.
Chpt 49-51
- In the short gam that ensued she gave us strong news of Moby Dick.
Chpt 52-54
Definitions:
- (meaning too rare to warrant focus)
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(Moby-Dick) arguably the preeminent American novel; Melville's tale of Ishmael's observations as Ahab obsessively chases the great white whale (1851)editor's notes: This classic American novel is commonly referenced in popular culture in television shows as well as literary works.