Herman Melville's "Moby Dick": 10 most memorable lines

While Herman Melville lived, little attention was paid to "Moby Dick." When the ambitious, electric, darkly philosophical story of a mad sea captain's obsession with an albino whale was published in 1851, most of the world ignored it. It wasn't until the 1920s – a few decades after Melville's 1891 death – that literary historians began to take note. Here are 10 of the lines most memorably associated with the book now called a masterwork of world literature.     

1. How we begin

Illustration by Rockwell Kent/Courtesy of the Plattsburgh State Art Museum, State University of New York USA, Rockwell Kent Collection, Bequest of Sally Kent Gordon

"Call me Ishmael."

Herman Melville created one of the best-known opening lines in all of literature with this first sentence of "Moby Dick

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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