1 A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul.
2 I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are.
3 I rejoice in my spine, as in the firm audacious staff of that flag which I fling half out to the world.
4 Thus we see how that the spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at last into simple child's play.
Moby Dick By Herman MelvilleContextHighlight In CHAPTER 103. Measurement of The Whale's Skeleton. 5 The smallest, where the spine tapers away into the tail, is only two inches in width, and looks something like a white billiard-ball.
Moby Dick By Herman MelvilleContextHighlight In CHAPTER 103. Measurement of The Whale's Skeleton. 6 Besides, for some way, where I now saw but a naked spine, all that had been once wrapped round with tons of added bulk in flesh, muscle, blood, and bowels.
Moby Dick By Herman MelvilleContextHighlight In CHAPTER 103. Measurement of The Whale's Skeleton. 7 If you attentively regard almost any quadruped's spine, you will be struck with the resemblance of its vertebrae to a strung necklace of dwarfed skulls, all bearing rudimental resemblance to the skull proper.
8 The prow of the boat is partially unbroken, and is drawn just balancing upon the monster's spine; and standing in that prow, for that one single incomputable flash of time, you behold an oarsman, half shrouded by the incensed boiling spout of the whale, and in the act of leaping, as if from a precipice.
Moby Dick By Herman MelvilleContextHighlight In CHAPTER 56. Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and ... 9 To me this vast ivory-ribbed chest, with the long, unrelieved spine, extending far away from it in a straight line, not a little resembled the hull of a great ship new-laid upon the stocks, when only some twenty of her naked bow-ribs are inserted, and the keel is otherwise, for the time, but a long, disconnected timber.
Moby Dick By Herman MelvilleContextHighlight In CHAPTER 103. Measurement of The Whale's Skeleton. 10 Bear in mind, too, that under these untoward circumstances he has to cut many feet deep in the flesh; and in that subterraneous manner, without so much as getting one single peep into the ever-contracting gash thus made, he must skilfully steer clear of all adjacent, interdicted parts, and exactly divide the spine at a critical point hard by its insertion into the skull.