Quote

Dollars damn me and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. ... What I feel most moved to write, that is banned - it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.

Herman Melville

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Herman Melville
Age: 72 †
Born: 1819
Born: August 1
Died: 1891
Died: September 28
Art Collector
Essayist
Lecturer
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Sailor
Teacher
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Hermann Melville
Herman Melvill
Feel
Doors
Finals
Ajar
Feels
Pay
Damn
Hash
Writing
Books
Product
Grinning
Way
Forever
Dollars
Malicious
Upon
Door
Banned
Write
Devil
Altogether
Cannot
Moved
Holding
Book
Products
Final

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A good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing.
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Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!
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Think of it. To go down to posterity as a 'man who lived among the cannibals.'
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He who is ready to despair in solitary peril, plucks up a heart in the presence of another. In a plurality of comrades is much countenance and consolation.
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To be called one thing, is oftentimes to be another.
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It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great. Failure is the true test of greatness.
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To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.
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Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship's decks, like hungry dogs round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down every killed man that is tossed to them.
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truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more.
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Better be secure under one king, than exposed to violence from twenty millions of monarchs, though oneself be one of them.
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Nobody is so heartily despised as a pusillanimous, lazy, good-for-nothing, land-lubber a sailor has no bowels of compassion for him.
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Man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes.
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All deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea, while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore.
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We die of too much life.
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flight from tyranny does not of itself insure a safe asylum, far less a happy home.
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Truth is in things, and not in words.
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It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open.
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My means are sane, my motives and my object mad.
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Love's secrets, being mysteries, ever pertain to the transcendent and the infinite and so they are as airy bridges, by which ourfurther shadows pass over into the regions of the golden mists and exhalations whence all poetical, lovely thoughts are engendered, and drop into us, as though pearls should drop from rainbows.
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Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing
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