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I am heartily sorry I ever wrote anything about you — it was paltry. Lord, when shall we be done growing? As long as we have anything more to do, we have done nothing. So, now, let us add Moby-Dick to our blessing, and step from that. Leviathan is not the biggest fish; — I have heard of Krakens.
--
Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 1851); published in Memories of Hawthorne (1897) by Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, p. 158

 

Herman Melville

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Herman Melville is a god. … I cherish what he did. He was a genius. Wrote Moby-Dick. Wrote Pierre. Wrote The Confidence-Man, wrote Billy Budd. … Oh, yes — look at him. … Scares the bejesus out of people and makes them hate him. Because he's so good. Claggart has him killed in that book. Claggart has his eye on that boy. He will not tolerate such goodness, such blondeness, such blue eye. Goodness is scary. It's like you want to knock it. You want to hit it.

 

Herman Melville

 

When we think of the masterpieces that nobody praised and nobody read, back there in the past, we feel an impatient superiority to the readers of the past. If we had been there, we can’t help feeling, we’d have known that Moby-Dick was a good book—why, how could anyone help knowing?
But suppose someone says to us, “Well, you’re here now: what’s our own Moby-Dick? What’s the book that, a hundred years from now, everybody will look down on us for not having liked?” What do we say then?

 

Randall Jarrell

 

Herman Melville is a god. … I cherish what he did. He was a genius. Wrote Moby-Dick. Wrote Pierre. Wrote The Confidence-Man, wrote Billy Budd. … Oh, yes. Look at him. … Scares the bejesus out of people and makes them hate him. Because he's so good. Claggart has him killed in that book. Claggart has his eye on that boy. He will not tolerant such goodness, such blondeness, such blue eye. Goodness is scary. It's like you want to knock it. You want to hit it. Are we a country of beating down things? We love seeing people go down.

 

Maurice Sendak

 

The older you get, the humbler you get. I know I don't have that much to offer, and I know I've now read Moby Dick and Anna Karenina, and if I had read those books before I wrote The Hottest State, I don't think I'd have published it. I had the arrogance of the uneducated, which sometimes you need.

 

Ethan Hawke

 

This presidential race is the biggest dick contest in history. "Your dick is indecisive!" "Your dick started an unnecessary war!" "Your dick didn't get injured enough in Vietnam!" "Your dick didn't even go to Vietnam!" "Your dick is soft on terrorism!" "Your dick started terrorism!" "Your dick blamed Vietnam vets for atrocities that made all vets unable to come home to a hero's welcome." "Your dick forged its way out of military service!" Has this kind of dick-waggling happened before outside of a pro-wrestling context?

 

Margaret Cho