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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. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Us
Idea
Example
Related Quotes:
" 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
" For me, the hardest thing in the world is how to start a book. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Start
Book
Hardest
" 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. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Best
Struggle
Truth
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" I'll watch anything, from action to art films. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Anything
Films
Art
" I follow the Patriots, but the Steelers were my first and true love. I still have a 'Terrible Towel.' "
Nathaniel Philbrick
True
Follow
True Love
" 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.' "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Shore
More
Miles
" As a former English major, I have always been fascinated by the connections between literature and history. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Connections
Literature
History
" 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
" As an author of narrative history, I read a lot of history books. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Narrative
Read
History
" 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. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
You
Way
Us
" History is obviously dependent on the evidence, and it's always amazing to me how much evidence there is. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Always
Amazing
Evidence
" 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
" Even though I hadn't read a word of it, I grew up hating 'Moby-Dick.' "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Word
Up
Though
" Unfortunately, we have a tendency to see figures from the past as caricatures - either all good or all bad - when the truth is always much more complex. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Always
Good
Past
" 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
" I hated the fact that I had to read 'Moby-Dick' as a senior in high school. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
High School
School
High
" 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
" 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. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Literature
American
Want
" A good leader has to at some point trust those around him; otherwise, nothing constructive is going to get done. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Him
Trust
Nothing
" 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. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
You
Band
Impress
" 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
" 'Johnny Tremain,' Paul Revere's Ride, today's Tea Partiers - you have to tune all that out to get at the real story. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Ride
Real
Story
" You cannot underestimate the influence of Shakespeare. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Cannot
You
Underestimate
" By 1760, the Nantucketers had virtually exterminated the local whale population. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Local
Virtually
Whale
" For me, 'Moby-Dick' is more than the greatest American novel ever written; it is a metaphysical survival manual - the best guidebook there is for a literate man or woman facing an impenetrable unknown: the future of civilization in this storm-tossed 21st century. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Man
Future
Me
" Joseph Warren, like a lot of revolutionary leaders, was into Enlightenment literature. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Leaders
Enlightenment
Literature