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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. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Nothing
Better
Language
Related Quotes:
" For me, the hardest thing in the world is how to start a book. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Start
Book
Hardest
" Instead of being a page-turner, 'Moby-Dick' is a repository of American history and culture and the essentials of Western literature. The book is so encyclopedic that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the midst of the 19th century. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Book
History
Space
" 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. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Impossible
Love
Passion
" I'll watch anything, from action to art films. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Anything
Films
Art
" Washington worked very hard to create his legacy. Even before the War of Independence was over, he was assembling his papers and making sure they were going to be in a state of preservation that would represent as best he could the official side of what occurred during the Revolution. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Create
Revolution
War
" Nantucket was a Quaker-based culture, so they were not readers. There's a great Nantucket-based novel from the 19th century that Melville read for his research for 'Moby-Dick': 'Miriam Coffin' by Joseph Hart. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Culture
Great
Research
" Reading 'Moby-Dick' helps you discover how to live. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Live
Discover
Reading
" I'm a big Stephen King fan. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Stephen King
Big
Fan
" To my mind, an adventure is something a person willingly undertakes. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Mind
Adventure
Person
" 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. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Know
Meet
Short
" Most Americans have no clue that before there were highways, there were only waterways to get through the wilderness. If you weren't on a lake or a river, you were in a jungle. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Jungle
You
Wilderness
" 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. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Washington
Reality
Emotions
" We've got a yawl named the Phebe, which is named for a boat in a whaling journal my father and I edited. We keep a copy of the journal on board. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Copy
Got
Journal
" Martin Scorsese, everything he does, I've got to see. And Jack Nicholson, I've got to see what he does. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Does
Jack
See
" In all natural disasters through time, man needs to attach meaning to tragedy, no matter how random and inexplicable the event is. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Tragedy
Man
Meaning
" Some of my books sort of have a provocative take. Sometimes you find interesting things about characters that show they weren't necessarily the way people usually see them. It can make for lively conversations, but that's great. Spark a little controversy, get people to think about it. That's what it's all about. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Think
Interesting
People
" History is obviously dependent on the evidence, and it's always amazing to me how much evidence there is. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Always
Amazing
Evidence
" Whaling was the oil business of its day. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Day
Whaling
Oil
" By 1760, the Nantucketers had virtually exterminated the local whale population. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Local
Virtually
Whale
" 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. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Us
Idea
Example
" I consider myself a writer who happens to write about history, rather than a historian. I was an English major in college. What I've learned about history is in the field, so to speak. Going into the archives and working with it directly. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Working
History
Myself
" I do work-related stuff on airplanes. Then, when I'm in the hotel room or just vegging out, I read for pleasure. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Hotel
Room
Just
" One of the questions I face when working on a book about a historical event is whether I should visit the actual place that I'm writing about. No matter how scrupulously maintained a historic house or battlefield may be, it is nothing like it was in the long-ago past. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Writing
Face
Past
" 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. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Farmers
Sea
Earn
" We think of the revolution ending in Yorktown, Va. The fact of the matter is that the French defeated the British in a naval battle right in the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. Because the British fleet was coming to rescue Cornwallis, the British general, Washington was able to surround Cornwallis. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Revolution
Mouth
Ending
" Right whales - so named because they were 'the right whale to kill' - grazed the waters off Nantucket as if they were seagoing cattle, straining the nutrient-rich surface of the ocean through the bushy plates of baleen in their perpetually grinning mouths. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Right
Whale
Through
" 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. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Behavior
Boston
War
" 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. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
More
Philadelphia
Conservative
" 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. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
You
Place
Better
" I'm not one of these people who want to tear down our heroes and that kind of thing. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
People
Who
Want