At the age of 26 he read Moby-Dick, and wrote to his close friend Tom MacGreevy, "That's more like the real stuff. White whales and natural piety." (Damned to Fame, James Knowlson, 1996.)
And a slightly-relevant quote from Molloy:
There are people the sea doesn't suit, who prefer the mountains or the plain. Personally I feel no worse there than anywhere else. ... And I too once went forth on it, in a sort of oarless skiff, but I paddled with an old bit of drifwood. And I sometimes wonder if I ever came back, from that voyage. For if I see myself putting to sea, and the long hours without landfall, I do not see the return, the tossing on the breakers, and I do not hear the frail keel grating on the shore.
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