Moby Dick Pod

"Thus, while in life the great whale's body may have been a real terror to his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a world."

Thoughts on the death of a whale.

"Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own."

Ishmael talks about the whale's skin and marvels at its extraordinary qualities. 

"The ivory Pequod was turned into what seemed a shamble; every sailor a butcher. You would have thought we were offering up ten thousand red oxen to the sea gods."

The sailors cut the blubber off of the whale. A gruesome sight.  

"These two mariners, darting their long whaling-spades, kept up an incessant murdering of the sharks*, by striking the keen steel deep into their skulls, seemingly their only vital part."

The nearby sharks want a piece of that whale and the sailors must keep them away by stabbing into the water. 

"Who is not a cannibal?"

Stubb eats whale. Which may or may not be civilized. And why do we eat the things we do?  And who's to say? 

"If you have never seen that sight, then suspend your decision about the propriety of devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the devil."

Stubb teases and torments the ship's cook, Fleece, about the proper way to cook a whale steak. Fleece gives a sermon to the sharks down below. 

"Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters."

We learn about a tool used by whalemen. 

"The vast majority of failures in the fishery, it has not by any means been so much the speed of the whale as the before described exhaustion of the harpooneer that has caused them."

We learn of the fortitude and superhuman strength of the harpooner. 

"Whole Atlantics and Pacifics seemed passed as they shot on their way, till at length the whale somewhat slackened his flight."

The title says it all. 

What is this book anyway?