"Ahab was threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a view to the more certain accomplishment of that monomaniac thought of his soul."

"It almost seemed that while he [Ahab] himself was marking out lines and courses on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also...

"And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?"

"In essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for...

"But here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the instinct of the knowledge of the demonism in the world."

"What the White Whale was to them, or how to their unconscious understandings, also, in some dim, unsuspected way, he might have seemed...

"He [Ahab] piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as...

"All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and...

"The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating into them."

"For not only do fabulous rumors naturally grow out of the very body of all surprising terrible events, [. . .] but, in maritime life,...