White Whale Quotes

Instead of being a page-turner, 'Moby-Dick' is a repository of American history and culture and the essentials of Western literature. The book is so encyclopedic that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the midst of the 19th century.

Sleep and I do not have a good relationship. We have never been good friends. I am constantly chasing sleep and then pushing it away. A good night's sleep is my white whale. Like Ahab, I am also a total drama queen about it. I love to talk about how little sleep I get. I brag about it, as if it is a true indication of how hard I work.

Besides all those whaling details, Moby Dick is about someone who's looking for something so huge, something they've wanted all their life, yet they know when they find it, it will kill them.

He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.

When you look at almost every submarine movie, to some degree or another, there's this 'Moby Dick' element, this Ahab element to them.

'Moby-Dick' has a remarkable way of resonating with whatever is going on in the world at that particular moment.

Captain Ahab drowned, he reminded himself; it was the trimmer, Ishmael, who survived.

Captain Ahab was a man possessed with an obsessional drive to pursue the white whale which had harmed him - which had torn his leg out - to the ends of the Earth, no matter what happened. In the final scene of the novel, Captain Ahab is being borne out to sea, wrapped around the white whale with the rope of his own harpoon and going obviously to his death. It was a scene of almost suicidal finality.

Even though I hadn't read a word of it, I grew up hating 'Moby-Dick.'

I think people have the wrong idea of 'Moby Dick' as this somber, boring thing.

Ken Starr has become a prosecutorial Captain Ahab.