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But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound.Herman Melville
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And the drawing near of Death, which alike levels all, alike impresses all with a last revelation, which only an author from the dead could adequately tell.Herman Melville
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It is a truth universally acknowledged, he’d mused, that most people will never find their ‘call me Ishmael’.Django Wylie
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In school I ended up writing three different papers on "The Castaway" section of Moby-Dick, the chapter where the cabin boy Pip falls overboard and is driven mad by the empty immensity of what he finds himself floating in. And when I teach school now I always teach Crane's horrific "The Open Boat, " and get all bent out of shape when the kids find the story dull or jaunty-adventurish: I want them to feel the same marrow-level dread of the oceanic I've always felt, the intuition of the sea as primordial nada, bottomless, depths inhabited by cackling tooth-studded things rising toward you at the rate a feather falls.David Foster Wallace
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Shakespeare wrote Moby-Dick, using Melville as a Ouija board.Ray Bradbury