My Ishmael Quotes

“And I, Nephi, took one of the daughters of Ishmael to wife.' Well Mr. Go-And-Do just went and did!”

— John Bytheway

“When we look at Abraham, Sarah, Hagar and Ishmael, we see that God's grace can survive our three-ring-circuses of compromise, rationalization and weak faith.”

— Carl Prude Jr.

“Call me Ishmael.”

— Herman Melville

“Siddhartha wants liberation, Dante wants Beatrice, Frodo wants to get to Mount Doom-we all want something. Quest is elemental to the human experience. All road narratives are to some extent built on quest. If you're a woman, though, this fundamental possibility of quest is denied. You can't go anywhere if you can't step out onto a road ...
... (T)here is no female counterpart in our culture to Ishmael or Huck Finn. There is no Dean Moriarty, Sal, or even a Fuckhead. It sounds like a doctoral crisis, but it's not. As a fifteen-year-old hitchhiker, my survival depended upon other people's ability to envision a possible future for me. Without a Melvillean or Kerouacian framework, or at least some kind of narrative to spell out a potential beyond death, none of my resourcefulness or curiosity was recognizable, and therefore I was unrecognizable.”

— Vanessa Veselka

“If you can't discover what's keeping you in, the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual - Ishmael”

— Daniel Quinn

“In Ishmael I articulated a living mythology that is so integral to our culture that it's never examined or even noticed by anyone. It's like the sound of blood rushing through your veins-you hear it so constantly that you don't hear it at all.”

— Daniel Quinn

“What I said in Ishmael stands: There is no One Right Way to live. What we find among Leaver peoples is that each has a way that works well for them. We may not like one particular way, we may think it atrocious and cruel, but it's their way, not ours, and the most murderous culture in human history is hardly in a position to set itself up as the moral policeman of the world.”

— Daniel Quinn

“Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.”

— Herman Melville

“If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant's face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale's brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can.”

— Herman Melville

“To Ishmael, the whale's indefinite whiteness' shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation. [It's] a color-less, all-color of atheism from which we shrink.”

— Herman Melville

“I have been trying to think clearly about everything and to use all this distance to advantage. And here is what I've discovered. I don't love you, Ishmael.”

— David Guterson

“He had watched her, after all, mourn her husband's death and it had been for her in part the discovery that grief could attach itself with permanence - something Ishmael had already discovered. It attached itself and then it burrowed inside and made a nest and stayed. It ate whatever was warm nearby, and then the coldness settled in permanently. You learned to live with it.”

— David Guterson

“I can't tell you what to do, Ishmael. I've tried to understand what it's been like for you - having gone to war, having lost your arm, not having married or had children. I've tried to make sense of it all, believe me, I have - how it must feel to be you. But I must confess that, no matter how I try, I can't really understand you. There are other boys, after all, who went to war and came back home and pushed on with their lives. They found girls and married and had children and raised families despite whatever was behind them. But you - you went numb, Ishmael. And you've stayed numb all these years.”

— David Guterson

“There were guys who prayed at Tarawa,' said Ishmael. 'They still got killed, Mother. Just like the guys who didn't pray. It didn't matter either way.”

— David Guterson

“Captain Ahab drowned, he reminded himself; it was the trimmer, Ishmael, who survived.”

— Salman Rushdie

“Call me Ishmael. I won't answer to it, because it's not my name.”

— Jenny Lawson

“There shall be in the church a fleshly seed of Abraham and a spiritual; a Cain and an Abel; an Ishmael and an Isaac; an Esau and a Jacob; as I have said, a worker and a believer; a great multitude of them that be called, and a small flock of them that be elect and chosen.31”

— Steven J. Lawson

“Ishmael Beah was born and spent his childhood in Sierra Leone as that sad but beautiful West African country was ravaged by a civil war that left some 50,000 dead between 1991 and 2002. He was a child soldier for a while, then, through extraordinary circumstances, was set free of that life.”

— Carolyn See

“The great lesson I get from 'Moby-Dick' is that when the times are bad, when there is great foreboding, there are still ways to go about living. It's through Ishmael that I find a kind of overall cosmic approach to a meaningful life in this meaningless world.”

— Nathaniel Philbrick

“Ishmael was looking at him through narrowed eyes. "This is very important to you, this box."
"It's important to the world."
Ishmael said: "The sun rises, and the sun sets. Sometimes it rains. We live, then we die." He shrugged.
He would never understand, Wolff thought; but others would.”

— Ken Follett

“Well, and keep in mind where those Masonic Mysteries came from in the first place. (Check out Ishmael Reed. He knows more about it than you'll ever find here.)”

— Thomas Pynchon

“The book of Genesis is a window into what cultures were like before the revelation of the Bible. One thing we see early on is the widespread practice of primogeniture-the eldest son inherited all the wealth, which is how they ensured the family kept its status and place in society. So the second or third son got nothing, or very little. Yet all through the Bible, when God chooses someone to work through, he chooses the younger sibling. He chooses Abel over Cain. He chooses Isaac over Ishmael. He chooses Jacob over Esau. He chooses David over all eleven of his older brothers. Time after time he chooses not the oldest, not the one the world expects and rewards. Never the one from Jerusalem, as it were, but always the one from Nazareth.”

— Timothy Keller

“Of course I'm trying to trick you!" Olaf cried. "That's the way of the world, Baudelaires. Everybody runs around with their secrets and their schemes, trying to outwit everyone else. Ishmael outwitted me, and put me in this cage. But I know how to outwit him and all his islander friends. If you let me out. I can be king of Olaf-land, and you three can be my new henchfolk."
"We don't want to be your henchfolk," Klaus said. "We just want to be safe."
"Nowhere in the world is safe," Count Olaf said.”

— Lemony Snicket

“Looking around, Ishmael noted that the humans in control here didn't seem to care. Why is their religious fervor acceptable, while ours is a matter of scorn?”

— Brian Herbert

“It must be particularly borne in mind, that Mahomet did not profess to set up a new religion ; but to restore that derived in the earliest times from God himself. " We follow," says the Koran, " the religion of Abraham the orthodox, who was no idolater. We believe in God and that which hath been sent down to us, and that which hath been sent down unto Abraham and Ishmael, and Isaac and Jacob and the tribes, and that which was delivered unto Moses and Jesus, and that which was delivered unto the prophets from the Lord : we make no distinction between any of them, and to God we are resigned.”

— Washington Irving

“It was his belief, furthermore, that this religion, so elevated and simple, had repeatedly been corrupted and debased by man, and especially outraged by idolatry; wherefore a succession of prophets, each inspired by a revelation from the Most High, had been sent from time to time, and at distant periods, to restore it to its original purity. Such was Noah, such was Abraham, such was Moses, and such was Jesus Christ. By each of these, the true religion had been reinstated upon earth, but had again been vitiated by their followers. The faith, as taught and practiced by Abraham when he came out of the land of Chaldea, seems especially to have formed a religious standard in his mind, from his veneration for the patriarch as the father of Ishmael, the progenitor of his race.”

— Washington Irving

“Ishy, you got any homework?"
"If it's fractions, I'll help you," Sam said.
"Hen still doesn't know how to do fractions."
"I have spelling words I have to mesmerize," Ishmael said
"Those words will never know what hit them" Sam said.”

— Nick Wilgus

“Arabia was idolatrous when, six centuries after Jesus, Muhammad introduced the worship of the God of Abraham, of Ishmael, of Moses, and Jesus. The Ariyans and some other sects had disturbed the tranquility of the east by agitating the question of the nature of the Father, the son, and the Holy Ghost. Muhammad declared that there was none but one God who had no father, no son and that the trinity imported the idea of idolatry ...”

— Napoleon Bonaparte

“David Simon goes to the Jewish Weekly and said he's made all this money, but he can't enjoy it because of criticism by people like Ishmael Reed.”

— Ishmael Reed

“As God's child advances spiritually be shall discover that the Lord's time is as important as the Lord's will. Do not rashly beget an Ishmael lest he become the greatest enemy to Isaac.”

— Watchman Nee