whale quotes

But he answered and said unto them, An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas: For Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

-Bible (NewTestament)
St Matthew12:39^40.

'Noble and generous Cetacean, have you ever tasted Man?' 'No,'said the Whale.'What is it like?' 'Nice,'said the small 'Stute Fish.'Nice but nubbly.'

- (Joseph) Rudyard Kipling
  Just So Stories,'How the Whale Got His Throat'.

This is the end of the whaleroad and the whale Who spewed Nantucket bones on the thrashed swell And stirred the troubled waters to whirlpools To send the Pequod packing off to hell

- RobertTraill Spence,Jr Lowell
  'The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket', pt.4. The Pequod was the ship that sailed after Moby Dick in Melville's novel.

I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life, To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife; And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover, And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.

-John Edward Masefield
  'Sea Fever'.

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

- Herman Melville
Moby Dick, ch.24.

It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me†for all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honourable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of a panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.

- Herman Melville
  Ishmael. Moby Dick, ch.42.

Strong is the lionlike a coal His eye-balllike a bastion's mole His chest against the foes: Strong, the gier-eagle on his sail, Strong against tide, th'enormous whale Emerges as he goes.

- Christopher Smart
  A Song to David, stanza 76.

The mighty US suddenly seemed as impotent as a beached whale.

-Time
  On the fall of 28 of SouthVietnam's 44 provincial capitals. 15 Feb.