Nathaniel Philbrick Quotes
-
Even though I hadn't read a word of it, I grew up hating 'Moby-Dick.'
-
The American Revolution as it actually unfolded was so troubling and strange that once the struggle was over, a generation did its best to remove all traces of the truth.
-
What's been largely forgotten is that Washington was highly passionate and aggressive, and it was only after losing Philadelphia to the British after a string of disastrous battlefield performances that he finally resigned himself to the more conservative approach with which he has since become associated.
-
To my mind, an adventure is something a person willingly undertakes.
-
You cannot underestimate the influence of Shakespeare.
-
After Brown, I went to Duke, to a Ph.D. program in American literature. My dad's an English professor. After a year there, I was like, 'Jesus. I don't want to do this. I don't want to be in the library.' So I pulled the ripcord, and that was it.
-
You know, if you're at home with children, you lose twenty-five IQ points.
-
The irony is that Washington was, in reality, very much like Benedict Arnold. The big difference was that Washington was ultimately able to control his emotions, something Arnold never learned to do.
-
Whatever you read, there's no better place to read than the cockpit or the berth of a boat. It's kind of like being in a womb.
-
More than 25 miles off the coast of Massachusetts and only 14 miles long, Nantucket is, as Herman Melville wrote in 'Moby-Dick,' 'away off shore.'
-
Nantucket's English settlers, who first disembarked on the island in 1659, had been mindful of the sea's dangers. They had hoped to earn their livelihoods not as fishermen but as farmers and shepherds on this grassy isle dotted with ponds, where no wolves preyed.
-
By 1760, the Nantucketers had virtually exterminated the local whale population.
-
Martin Scorsese, everything he does, I've got to see. And Jack Nicholson, I've got to see what he does.
-
In the years to come, the combination of climate change and population growth could have a devastating effect on the planet and, needless to say, on humanity.
-
I do work-related stuff on airplanes. Then, when I'm in the hotel room or just vegging out, I read for pleasure.
-
It is impossible to say when 37-year-old Benedict Arnold first met 18-year-old Peggy Shippen, but we do know that on September 25, 1778, he wrote her a love letter - much of it an exact copy of one he'd sent to another woman six months before. But if the overheated rhetoric was recycled, Arnold's passion was genuine.
-
He was born in 1741, a descendant of the Rhode Island equivalent of royalty. The first Benedict Arnold had been one of the colony's founders, and subsequent generations had helped to establish the Arnolds as solid and respected citizens.
-
'Moby-Dick' has a remarkable way of resonating with whatever is going on in the world at that particular moment.
-
I don't subscribe to the idea that the founders or anyone else were somehow better than us and that we have to live up to their example.
-
When I was at Brown, I wanted to write the great American novel, but I was too scared to take a creative course. I signed up for one, got in, and just didn't have the courage to go. I was a tremendously shy person, almost pathologically shy. The thought of peers critiquing my work - oh, God.
-
There's an ugly civil war side to revolutionary Boston that we don't often talk about and a lot of thuggish, vigilante behavior by groups like the Sons of Liberty.
-
As an author of narrative history, I read a lot of history books.
-
Writing can't be too calculated. My best writing is when I set it aside, move on. It's not when I'm crafting a sentence, thinking about what word should follow another.
-
I'll watch anything, from action to art films.