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"From without no wonderful effect is wrought within ourselves unless some interior responding wonder meets it."
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"With Bound, we wanted to pull at conventions, because you begin to wonder, Why do these stereotypes exist? Where do they come from? You use that as the subtext."

"I still find the moon more amazing than the fact men have walked on it."

"I remember a cartoon depicting a chimney sweep falling from the roof of a tall building and noticing on the way that a signboard had one word spelled wrong, and wondering in his headlong flight why nobody had thought of correcting it. In a sense, we all are crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles-no matter the imminent peril-these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness, and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from common sense and its logic, that we know the world to be good."

"When a beautiful reality looks unreal, you will realize that the beauty of reality is superior to any dream whatsoever!"
Explore more quotes by Herman Melville

"To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living."

"Ahab still stood like an anvil, receiving every shock, but without the least quivering of his own."

"There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath..."

"Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?"

"Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope."

"Next morning the not-yet-subsided sea rolled in long slow billows of mighty bulk, and striving in the Pequod's gurgling track, pushed her on like giants' palms outspread. The strong, unstaggering breeze abounded so, that sky and air seemed vast outbellying sails; the whole world boomed before the wind. Muffled in the full morning light, the invisible sun was only known by the spread intensity of his place; where his bayonet rays moved on in stacks. Emblazonings, as of crowned Babylonian kings and queens, reigned over everything. The sea was as a crucible of molten gold, that bubblingly leaps with light and heat."

"Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are."
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