Billy Budd

By Herman Melville QUOTATION: I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist.
ATTRIBUTION: Herman Melville (1819–1891), U.S. poet, novelist. Billy Budd, Foretopman (l. 31).

QUOTATION: Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I’ll dream fast asleep.
ATTRIBUTION: Herman Melville (1819–1891), U.S. poet, novelist. Billy Budd, Foretopman (l. 28).

QUOTATION: A true military officer is in one particular like a true monk. Not with more self-abnegation will the latter keep his vows of monastic obedience than the former his vows of allegiance to martial duty.
ATTRIBUTION: Herman Melville (1819–1891), U.S. author. Billy Budd, Sailor (c. 1889), ch. 21, eds. Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. (1962).

QUOTATION: To an immature nature essentially honest and humane, forewarning intimations of subtler danger from one’s kind come tardily if at all.
ATTRIBUTION: Herman Melville (1819–1891), U.S. author. Billy Budd, Sailor (c. 1889), ch. 19, eds. Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. (1962).

QUOTATION: To anybody who can hold the Present at its worth without being inappreciative of the Past, it may be forgiven, if to such an one the solitary old hulk at Portsmouth, Nelson’s Victory, seems to float there, not alone as the decaying monument of a fame incorruptible, but also as a poetic approach, softened by its picturesqueness, to the Monitors and yet mightier hulls of the European ironclads.
ATTRIBUTION: Herman Melville (1819–1891), U.S. author. Billy Budd, Sailor (c. 1889), ch. 4, eds. Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. (1962).

QUOTATION: Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.
ATTRIBUTION: Herman Melville (1819–1891), U.S. author. Billy Budd, Sailor (c. 1889), ch. 28, eds. Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. (1962).

QUOTATION: Are sailors, frequenters of fiddlers’ greens, without vices? No; but less often than with landsmen do their vices, so called, partake of crookedness of heart, seeming less to proceed from viciousness than exuberance of vitality after long constraint: frank manifestations in accordance with natural law.
ATTRIBUTION: Herman Melville (1819–1891), U.S. author. Billy Budd, Sailor (c. 1889), ch. 2, eds. Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. (1962).

QUOTATION: If a well-constituted individual refrains from blazoning aught amiss or calamitous in his family, a nation in the like circumstance may without reproach be equally discreet.
ATTRIBUTION: Herman Melville (1819–1891), U.S. author. Billy Budd, Sailor (c. 1889), ch. 3, eds. Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. (1962).

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