Whore. I watched her mouth go round as she said the harsh word. The world as I knew it seemed sucked into that

mouth. With the sound of the word, whose meaning I knew by instinct and the puckered rounding of her thick lips,

I lost my innocence.

p.132

For more than a month, we saw neither whales nor ships. We seemed suspended in time; our killing tools grew

sharper and sharper.

p.181

And I turned my life - is it too much to say? - away from her. My body seemed a boat, my clothes the sails, myself

the captain.

p.341

[Ahab's wife - Sena J. Naslund]