Nathaniel Philbrick Quotes
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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.
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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 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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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 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.
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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.