#dick

Why else do we write and write except to move our readers? ↗

— Jerome Charyn

#historical-fiction #novel #life

In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among the many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all over obliquely crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick array, something like those in the finest Italian line engravings. But these marks do not seem to be impressed upon the isinglass substance above mentioned, but seem to be seen through it, as if they were engraved upon the body itself. Nor is this all. In some instances, to the quick, observant eye, those linear marks, as in a veritable engraving, but afford the ground for far other delineations. These are hieroglyphical; that is, if you call those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word to use in the present connexion. By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale in particular, I was much struck with a plate representing the old Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable. ↗

— Herman Melville

#moby-dick #whale #whales #life

No one knows if Saddam is still alive. They keep showing old footage of him on TV saying that it's live. You know, it's like the same thing we do with Dick Cheney. ↗

— David Letterman

#cheney #dick cheney #footage #him #keep

I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare. ↗

— Ben Okri

#dickens #home #i #literature #london

The U.S. army confirmed that it gave a lucrative fire fighting contract in Iraq to the firm once run by the Vice President Dick Cheney without any competitive bidding. When asked if this could be conceived as Cheney's friends profiting from the war, the spokesman said 'Yes.' ↗

— Conan O'Brien

#army #asked #bidding #cheney #competitive

Between Scott on the earlier side and Dickens and Thackeray on the other, there was an immense production of novels, illustrated by not a few names which should rank high in the second class, while some would promote more than one of them to the first. ↗

— George Saintsbury

#class #dickens #earlier #few #first

I had this almost Dickensian look. I was quite fragile. ↗

— Rod Stewart

#dickensian #fragile #had #i #look

All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#art

Dad used to read aloud to us from Dickens and Kipling. My tastes were omnivorous. I read anything I could lay my hands on, but the memory that stays with me is that of my father reading the Jungle Books to us when we were young. Beautiful stories! ↗

— A.B. Guthrie

#childhood-memory #childhood-stories #dickens #interview-transcription #kipling

What business have I with this pipe? This thing that is meant for sereneness, to send up mild white vapors among mild white hairs, not among torn iron-grey locks like mine. I'll smoke no more. ↗

— Herman Melville

#the-pipe #business