We saw the Encantadas, but on the Encantadas we saw something Melville hadn't written about.
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Mrs. Venable, Scene OneTennessee Williams
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Well, now I've said it, my son was looking for God. I mean for a clear image of Him. He spent that whole blazing equatorial day in the crow's nest of the schooner watching that thing on the beach of the Encantadas till it was too dark to see it, and when he came back down the rigging, he said, Well, now I've seen Him!—and he meant God . . .
Tennessee Williams
THE greatest seer and poet of the sea for me is Melville. His vision is more real than Swinburne's, because he doesn't personify the sea, and far sounder than Joseph Conrad's, because Melville doesn't sentimentalize the ocean and the sea's unfortunates. Melville at his best invariably wrote from a sort of dreamself, so that events which he relates as actual fact have indeed a far deeper reference to his own soul, his own inner life. Melville was, at the core, a mystic and an idealist.
Herman Melville
People who hadn't noticed me, or who had written me off as a game show host, started to reassess me. There were people who hadn't seen me as a stand-up artist and liked it. Suddenly I was in fashion again.
Bob Monkhouse
Nobody had more class than Melville. To do what he did in Moby-Dick, to tell a story and to risk putting so much material into it. If you could weigh a book, I don’t know any book that would be more full. It’s more full than War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov. It has Saint Elmo’s fire, and great whales, and grand arguments between heroes, and secret passions. It risks wandering far, far out into the globe. Melville took on the whole world, saw it all in a vision, and risked everything in prose that sings. You have a sense from the very beginning that Melville had a vision in his mind of what this book was going to look like, and he trusted himself to follow it through all the way.
Herman Melville
On one meeting Melville showed Hawthorne a draft of Moby-Dick. Hawthorne, himself currently completing The Scarlet Letter, persuaded his friend to rework it from a tale of the high seas to an epic allegory that told not only a tale, but probed the defeats and triumphs of the human spirit. Melville delayed his submission to his publishers until it could meet Hawthorne's exacting standards. When it did, Hawthorne at last pronounced that the tragic tale was "cooked in hellfire." It was the praise Melville had sought.
Herman Melville
Williams, Tennessee
Williams, Theodore Chickering
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