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The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction can not so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.

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
Truth
Edges
Narration
Always
Pure
Attainable
Fiction
Ragged
Told
Symmetry
Less
Fables
Fact
Readily
Facts
Achieved
Form
Essentially
Fable

More quotes by Herman Melville

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To treat of human actions is to deal wholly with second causes.
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Appalling is the soul of a man! Better might one be pushed off into the material spaces beyond the uttermost orbit of our sun, than once feel himself fairly afloat in himself.
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There are hardly five critics in America and several of them are asleep.
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In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.
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It is well known, that the best productions of the best human intellects, are generally regarded by those intellects as mere immature freshman exercises, wholly worthless in themselves, except as initiatives for entering the great University of God after death.
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If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how then with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books should be forbid.
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The friendship of fine-hearted, generous boys, nurtured amid the romance-engendering comforts and elegancies of life, sometimes transcends the bounds of mere boyishness, and revels for a while in the empyrean of a love which only comes short, by one degree, of the sweetest sentiment entertained between the sexes.
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Madman! Look through my eyes if thou hast none of thine own.
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Old age is always wakeful as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.
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There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship by her, borrowed from the sea by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God.
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In their precise tracings-out and subtle causations, the strongest and fieriest emotions of life defy all analytical insight.
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...The silent reminiscence of hardships departed, is sweeter than the presence of delight.
Herman Melville
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Thou wine art the friend of the friendless, though a foe to all.
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And yet self-knowledge is thought by some not so easy. Who knows, my dear sir, but for a time you may have taken yourself for somebody else? Stranger things have happened.
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I am, as I am whether hideous, or handsome, depends upon who is made judge.
Herman Melville
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No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe.
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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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A man of true science... thinks, that by mouthing hard words, he proves that he understands hard things.
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An utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.
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Talk not to me of blasphemy, man I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.
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