Whale Poachers Quotes

Positive thoughts (expectations) can change perspective, transform behaviors, and attract good fortune. ~ Donna M. McDine

I looked at whale jawbones in the museum this morning. Then I did some shopping. Whenever I go into the drugstore it seems that many people are buying condoms and motion sickness medicine. ~ Lydia Davis

His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw benieath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab's leg. ~ Herman Melville

Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such a day - very much such a sweetness as this - I struck my first whale - a boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty - forty - forty years ago! - ago! Forty years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not spent three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without - oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command! - when I think of all this; only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me before - and how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare - fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soul - when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world's fresh bread to my mouldy crusts - away, whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow - wife? wife? - rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ah ~ Herman Melville

So it was that my most impressionable years of boyhood were spent gazing at not a whale, but a whale's penis. Whenever I tired of strolling through the chill aisles of the aquarium, I'd steal off to my place on the bench of the high-ceilinged stillness of the exhibition room and spend hours on end there contemplating this whale's penis. ~ Haruki Murakami

We are standing on a whale fishing for minnows ~ Joseph Campbell

She helps me to the bathroom, helps me wash, then helps me put a gazillion tangles in my hair while she shampoos it. And she actually thinks we're going to leave it that way.
"I'm not going downstairs looking like a hobo," I tell her. "We have to comb it."
"That thick mess will break this flimsy comb. Can't you just run your fingers through it?"
It's weird to be arguing about my hair when we still haven't discussed my wound, how I got it, and how I came to be snoring in Galen's bed. We both seem to appreciate the bizarreness at the same time. Mom raises a brow. "Don't think you get special treatment just because you can make a whale do the tango. I'm still your mother."
We both laugh so hard I think I feel a tiny rip in my newly dressed wound. Without warning, Mom throws her arms around me, careful to avoid touching it. "I'm so proud of you, Emma. And I know your father would be, too. Your grandfather can't stop talking about it. You were amazing."
Ah, the bonding power of tangled hair and dancing whales.
She releases me the second before it gets awkward. "Let's get you dressed. We have a lot to discuss. And I get you're starving. Rachel made you…uh…Upchuck Eggs."
"She gets an A for effort. ~ Anna Banks

Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel?
Polonius: By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed.
Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.
Polonius: It is backed like a weasel.
Hamlet: Or like a whale?
Polonius: Very like a whale. ~ William Shakespeare

My state's constitution seems to contain a provision requiring that once every two years we must pass a bill which dazzles the entire country in its glittering, bejeweled stupidity. Not all of them are bad. I rather like the absurd ones. For instance, it is illegal to go whale hunting in Oklahoma. That law is certainly a nice gesture (whales both sing and have giant brains, putting them one point ahead of many legislators). But humpback poaching has never really been problematic in our part of the country, what with it being landlocked and all. ~ Andrew Heaton

These items make up my existence. The library tells my story, the mastodon my mistakes, the ship my discoveries and my abilities to make old things new without magic, and the whale...my limitations, I suppose. ~ Lisa McMann

A whale is as unique as a cactus. But don't ask a whale to survive Death Valley. We all have special gifts. Where we use them and how determines whether we actually complete something. ~ Max De Pree

Dudley had reached roughly the size and weight of a young killer whale. ~ J.K. Rowling

The man jumped and stared at the two little girls. "What are you doing here?" he demanded.
"We live here, in the caretaker's cabin," Rosetta answered. "Do you need help?"
"Do I need help?" he roared. "What do you think, you little snippet?"
"What's a snippet?" asked Bianca innocently. ~ Sarah Brazytis

It takes 25 years or so for a male sperm whale to reach the edge of social maturity, when it attains the size and weight of those I saw being butchered. It took less than four hours to transform those once vibrant creatures into the basic ingredients of candle wax, lubricating oils, cosmetics, fertilizer, ivory trinkets, and food for domesticated animals. ~ Sylvia Earle

A story of remarkable simplicity and charm. A young swimmer invites us into sea off the coast of California where through her eyes we see an entire realm of creatures we have never known so intimately before. Truly for people of all ages, Lynne Cox's adventure with the baby whale, Grayson, becomes a parable and an experience, thanks not only to the author's great and generous spirit, but through her immense gift for describing nature. ~ Anne Rice

you


you're a beast, she said
your big white belly
and those hairy feet.
you never cut your nails
and you have fat hands
paws like a cat
your bright red nose
and the biggest balls
I've ever seen.
you shoot sperm like a
whale shoots water out of the
hole in its back.

beast beast beast,
she kissed me,
what do you want for
breakfast? ~ Charles Bukowski

(Describing a whale killed during Una's maiden voyage) ... He was nearly twice the size of my sixty-barrel whale. Could the animal really be stowed below as small casks of oil? At your own death, I asked myself, can the vastness of your own experience be buried in the ground, funneled into nothing but the shape of a grave? ~ Sena Jeter Naslund

What sorrow is like to the sorrow of one who is alone?
Once I dwelt in the company of the king I loved well,
And my arm was heavy with the weight of the rings he gave,
And my heart weighed down with the gold of his love.
The face the king is like the sun to those who surrounded,.
But now my heart is empty
And I wander along throughout the world.
The groves take on their blossoms,
The trees and meadows grow fair
But the cuckoo, saddest of singers,
Cries forth the only sorrow of the exile,
And now my heart hoes wandering,
In search of what I shall never see more;
All faces are alike to me if I cannot see the face of my king,
And all countries are alike to me
When I cannot see the fair fields and meadows of my home.
So I shall arise and follow my heart in its wandering
For what is the fair meadow of home to me
When I cannot see the face of my king
And the weight on my arm is but a band of gold
When the heart is empty of the weight of love.
And so I shall go roaming
Over the fishers' road
And the road of the great whale
And beyond the country of the wave
With none to bear me company
But the memory of those I loved
And the songs I sang out of a full heart,
And the cuckoo's cry in memory. ~ Marion Zimmer Bradley

In the [first] fifteen years [of field work] I can remember just ten times when I had really narrow escapes from death. Two were from drowning in typhoons, one was when our boat was charged by a wounded whale; once my wife and I were nearly eaten by wild dogs, once we were in great danger from fanatical lama priests; two were close calls when I fell over cliffs, once I was nearly caught by a huge python, and twice I might have been killed by bandits. ~ Roy Chapman Andrews

Obama. Kathy was becoming obsessed with the numbness, the way the news cycle was making her incapable of action, a beached somnolent whale. No one could put anything together, that was the problem. She had recently read an article that listed all the reasons why monarch butterflies were dying, before equations were too difficult, you knew intellectually, but you never really saw the consequences, since they tended to impact other poorer people in other poorer places. There is no away to throw things to didn't quite work as an axiom if you were a species that depended so stubbornly on the evidence of its eyes. ~ Olivia Laing

In hunter-gatherer times, [the amount of energy human beings use each day] was about 2,500 calories, all of it food. That is the daily energy intake of a common dolphin. A modern human being uses 31,000 calories a day, most of it in the form of fossil fuel. That is the intake of a pilot whale. And the average American uses six times that-as much as a sperm whale. We have become, in other words, different from the people we used to be.... We've ... gotten bigger. We appear to be the same species, with stomachs of the same size, but we aren't.1o ~ Daniel Bodansky

A gentle joyousness-a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale. Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns; his lovely, leering eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness, rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete; not Jove, not that great majesty Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam. ~ Herman Melville

But when he crested the hill, the sight that greeted him made him pause. At the bottom of the hill stood Celia in a riding habit, her gun pointed in his direction. He halted just as she spotted him.
After emptying the gun by firing it in the opposite direction, she set it on the ground facing away from them, picked up her skirts, and came up the hill with fire in her eyes. "Are you trying to get yourself killed?" she cried.
Only then did he notice the target that was set into the hill below him. So this was where she did her shooting practice. He should have known she'd have a secret spot for it.
"Pardon me for interrupting," he said dryly as she approached. "When I heard shots, I thought it was poachers."
"And you were going to confront them alone?" She planted her hands on her hips. "What if there were several, armed and ready to shoot?"
The very idea made him roll his eyes. "In my experience, poachers run when they see someone coming. They don't brandish guns." He couldn't resist taunting her. "You're the only person who does that, my lady."
At his use of her title, she stiffened. "Well, you could have been hurt all the same. You really mustn't sneak up on people like that. And what are you doing up so early, anyway?" Her eyes narrowed. "You can't be going to London-you're heading in the wrong direction."
"I'm off to High Wycombe. Apparently your old nurse lives there, so I'm going to question her about the events on the morning of your p ~ Sabrina Jeffries

I might be small, but I have the lung capacity of a whale, so if you don't move I'm gonna have to release the oral Kraken until the entire school is in this hallway rescuing me from you."
I crack up. "The oral Kraken? That sounds pretty dirty."
"I'm thinking everything sounds dirty to you," she says dryly. ~ Erin Watt

He'd done his walls with paint from Holy Basil. God, I yearned for their colors. I hadn't been able to afford them myself but I knew their color chart like the back of my hand. His hall was done in Gangrene, his stairs in Agony and his living room
unless I was very much mistaken
in Dead Whale. Colors I personally very much approved of. ~ Marian Keyes

Not much to say except to warn you not to get too serious about all this, if you want to become a writer of fiction in the future. If you intend to become a critic, that is a Whale of another color ... Playing around with symbols, even as a critic, can be a kind of kiddish parlor game. A little of it goes a long way. There are other things of greater value in any novel or story ... humanity, character analysis, truth on other levels ... Good symbolism should be as natural as breathing ... and as unobtrusive. ~ Ray Bradbury

I'm more of a fisherman as opposed to a scientist perhaps and chasing the whale. But I've had some success. ~ Matt Walsh

So say you are charged with, you and some of your colleagues, lifting a heavy dead whale carcass onto a flatbed. ~ George Saunders

Well, where did you come from? Evolution? Creation? Couldn't we have evolved in the same way as other species, predator and prey? Or, if you don't believe that all this world could have just happened on its own, which is hard for me to accept myself, is it so hard to believe that the same force that created the delicate angelfish with the shark, the baby seal and the killer whale, could create both our kinds together?
Edward Cullen, Stephenie Meyer's Twilight ~ Stephenie Meyer

It is painful to witness the death of the smallest of God's created beings, much more, one in which life is so vigorously maintained as the Whale! And when I saw this, the largest and most terrible of all created animals bleeding, quivering, dying a victim to the cunning of man, my feelings were indeed peculiar! ~ Nathaniel Philbrick

I am what became of your child. I found an old baby picture of me. And it was somebody else, not me. It was somebody pink and fat who never heard of sick or lonely, somebody who cried and got fed,, and reached up and got held and kicked but didn't hurt anybody, and slept whenever she wanted to, just by closing her eyes. Somebody who mainly just laid there and laughed at the colors waving around over her head and chewed on a polka-dot whale and woke up knowing some new trick nearly every day and rolled over and drooled on the sheet and felt your hand pulling my quilt back up over me. That's who I started out and this is who is left. That's what this is about. It's somebody I lost, all right, it's my own self. Who I never was. Or who I tried to be and never got there. Somebody I waited for who never came. And never will. So, see, it doesn't much matter what else happens in the world or in this house, even. I'm what was worth waiting for and I didn't make it. Me...who might have made a difference to me...I'm not going to show up, so there's no reason to stay, except to keep you company, and that's...not reason enough because I'm not...very good company. Am I. ~ Marsha Norman

The medieval church imposed fast days on which sexual intercourse and the eating of flesh were forbidden, but eating "cold" foods was permitted. because fish came from water, it was deemed cold, as were waterfowl and whale, but meat was considered hot food. ~ Mark Kurlansky

Moby Dick, the Great White Whale, tore off Ahab's leg at the knee, when Ahab was attacking him. Quite right, too. Should have torn off both his legs, and a lot more besides. ~ D.H. Lawrence