Sublime

He often intimidated people, being a big and grim-looking sort of fellow; he’d accepted it years ago and had long since stopped trying to be the kind of man who smiled enough to make up for it.

Martin Silenus had been writing notes on a pad but now he stood and paced the length of the room. “Jesus Christ, people. Look at us. We’re not six fucking pilgrims, we’re a mob. Hoyt there with his cruciform carrying the ghost of Paul Duré. Our ‘semisentient’ erg in the box there. Colonel Kassad with his memory of Moneta. M. Brawne there, if we are

Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air!

“You extend hope at one moment and snatch it away at the next.” “Not I, but history.

He had the trick of speaking like one, rolling words like great boulders, lost in the details of his own legend.

When he talked, he was lawyer and bard and crossroads charlatan at once, arguing his case, entertaining, pulling back the veil to show you the secrets of the world.

Listen to me, O coastlands, pay attention, you peoples from far away!

"Man doth usurp all space, Stares thee, in rock, bush, river, in the face. Never thine eyes behold a tree; 'Tis no sea thou seest in the sea, 'Tis but a disguised humanity. To avoid thy fellow, vain thy plan; All that interests a man, is man."

The sea is raging; everything is in the sea. Well then, old sea dogs! What of fatherland? Our helm steers us toward our children’s land! Out there, stormier than the sea, storms our great longing!