Quote

Much of a man's character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul.

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
Thin
Feels
Whoever
Much
Noble
Never
Full
Upheld
Would
Rather
Skull
Men
Found
Skulls
Character
Backbone
Soul
Spine

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Will you, or will you not, quit me? I now demanded in a sudden passion, advancing close to him. I would prefer not to quit you, he replied, gently emphasizing the not.
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Immortality is but ubiquity in time.
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This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant I act under orders.
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The only true infidelity is for a live man to vote himself dead.
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I am, as I am whether hideous, or handsome, depends upon who is made judge.
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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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To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.
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Beneath those stars is a universe of gliding monsters.
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Strange as it may seem, there is nothing in which a young and beautiful female appears to more advantage than in the art of smoking.
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Are not half our lives spent in reproaches for foregone actions, of the true nature and consequences of which we were wholly ignorant at the time?
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Talk not to me of blasphemy, man I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.
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The lightning flashes through my skull mine eyeballs ache and ache my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground.
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Think of it. To go down to posterity as a 'man who lived among the cannibals.'
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Charity, like poetry, should be cultivated, if only for its being graceful.
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Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!
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Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!
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Stripped of the cunning artifices of the tailor, and standing forth in the garb of Eden - what a sorry set of round-shouldered, spindle-shanked, crane-necked varlets would civilized men appear!
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There are doubts, sir, which, if man have them, it is not man that can solve them.
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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.
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I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best.
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