A chapter a day keeps the hypos away

Geology/oceanography graduate student re-reading Moby-Dick one chapter a day.  

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The drama's done.

Epilogue

What a book.

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and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.

Chapter 135, The Chase - Third Day

Good riddance, Ahab et al.  No more whales will die at your harpoons.

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Whatever pale fears and forebodings some of them might have felt before; these were not only now kept out of sight through the growing awe of Ahab, but they were broken up, and on all sides routed, as timid prairie hares that scatter before the bounding bison.

Chapter 134, The Chase - Second Day

These last few chapters (and the whole book, really) are filled with some great similes.

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and he too plainly seemed to see, that as the most poisonous reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as the sweetest songster of the grove; so, equally with every felicity, all miserable events do naturally beget their like.

Chapter 106, Ahab’s Leg

It would appear I forgot a chapter’s quote.  A little out of order, but I promised a quote from every chapter!  So here’s 106.

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The glittering mouth yawned beneath the boat like an open-doored marble tomb

Chapter 133, The Chase - First Day

Now we get some Moby Dick action!

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Hither, and thither, on high, gilded the snow-white wings of small, unspeckled birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air; but to and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed mighty leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks; and these were the strong, troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea.

Chapter 132, The Symphony

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The intense Pequod sailed on; the rolling waves and days went by; the life-buoy coffin still lightly swung; and another ship, most miserably named the Delight, was descried.

Chapter 131, The Pequod meets the Delight

I know he’s a famous author and all, but Melville sure has a way with words.

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Alike, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, seemed ground to finest dust, and powdered, for the time, in the clamped mortar of Ahab's iron soul.

Chapter 130, The Hat

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But here I'll stay, though this stern strikes rocks; and they bulge through; and oysters come to join me.

Chapter 129, The Cabin

Well that’s a poetic way to say you’ll go down with this ship.

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and Ahab still stood like an anvil, receiving every shock, but without the least quivering of his own.

Chapter 128, The Rachel

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Oh! how immaterial are all materials!

Chapter 127, The Deck

Oh, ok, Ahab.

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And thus the first man of the Pequod that mounted the mast to look out for the White Whale, on the White Whale's own peculiar ground; that man was swallowed up in the deep.

Chapter 126, The Life-Buoy

Time for some action!

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They went towards the extreme stern, on the ship's lee side, where the deck, with the oblique energy of the wind, was now almost dipping into the creamy, sidelong-rushing sea.

Chapter 125, The Log and Line

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Muffled in the full morning light, the invisible sun was only known by the spread intensity of his place; where his bayonet rays moved on in stacks.  Emblazoning, as of crowned Babylonian kings and queens, reigned over everything.  The sea was as a crucible of molten gold, that bubbling leaps with light and heat.

Chapter 124, The Needle

The colors of the sun rising or setting over the ocean are some of the most brilliant I have ever seen.

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In a severe gale like this, while the ship is but a tossed shuttle-cock to the blast...

Chapter 123, The Musket

I always forget the little birdie thing in badminton is called a shuttle-cock, and it amuses me every time I am reminded of it.

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Um, um, um.  Stop that thunder!  Plenty too much thunder up here.  What's the use of thunder?  Um, um, um.  We don't want thunder; we want rum; give us a glass of rum.  Um, um, um!

Chapter 122, Midnight Aloft - Thunder and Lightning

This quote is literally the entire chapter.

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Shake yourself; you're Aquarius

Chapter 121, Midnight - The Forecastle Bulwarks

I like that Stubb tells Flask he’s Aquarius rather than just that he’s soaking wet.  I don’t know if people actually talked like this, but I think the world would be more enjoyable if they did.