Nathaniel Philbrick Quotes
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Maybe it's because I was named for him, but I've always wanted to meet Nathaniel Hawthorne. It's oversimplifying, but all Hawthorne's short stories and novels are, in one way or another, about guilt. Something profoundly disturbing must have happened to him at an early age. I'd like to know what that was.
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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.
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As an author of narrative history, I read a lot of history books.
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Joseph Warren, like a lot of revolutionary leaders, was into Enlightenment literature.
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If you live on Nantucket, you can't avoid its history, and 'Moby Dick' is the way most of us get into Nantucket's history.
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XTC is my favorite band; I'm a huge Neil Young fan, Jayhawks, all that type of stuff. I like Death Cab for Cutie, also Ryan Adams. I try to impress my children: 'Have you listened to such-and-such?' They're not impressed.
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History is obviously dependent on the evidence, and it's always amazing to me how much evidence there is.
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'Johnny Tremain,' Paul Revere's Ride, today's Tea Partiers - you have to tune all that out to get at the real story.
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I'll watch anything, from action to art films.
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I'm not one of these people who want to tear down our heroes and that kind of thing.
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In all natural disasters through time, man needs to attach meaning to tragedy, no matter how random and inexplicable the event is.
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For the very young, there's nothing better than Mother Goose and anything by Dr. Seuss for the rhythms and language.
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For me, the hardest thing in the world is how to start a book.
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The great lesson I get from 'Moby-Dick' is that when the times are bad, when there is great foreboding, there are still ways to go about living. It's through Ishmael that I find a kind of overall cosmic approach to a meaningful life in this meaningless world.