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" I hated the fact that I had to read 'Moby-Dick' as a senior in high school. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
High School
School
High
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" I'm a big Stephen King fan. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Stephen King
Big
Fan
" 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
" 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 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
" 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
" Even though I hadn't read a word of it, I grew up hating 'Moby-Dick.' "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Word
Up
Though
" 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
" 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
" Many of us came away from our youth thinking that the story of the Revolution was that the Americans were patriots fighting the oppressive British. It was kind of good versus evil, liberty versus tyranny. When you get into it, you find that it was much more complicated. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Revolution
Good
Evil
" As an author of narrative history, I read a lot of history books. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Narrative
Read
History
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Joseph Warren, like a lot of revolutionary leaders, was into Enlightenment literature. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Leaders
Enlightenment
Literature
" 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
" History is obviously dependent on the evidence, and it's always amazing to me how much evidence there is. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Always
Amazing
Evidence
" You know, if you're at home with children, you lose twenty-five IQ points. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Home
Lose
IQ
" 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
" Whaling was the oil business of its day. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Day
Whaling
Oil
" 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
" 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
" As a former English major, I have always been fascinated by the connections between literature and history. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Connections
Literature
History
" I'm not one of these people who want to tear down our heroes and that kind of thing. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
People
Who
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
" I had a great AP U.S. History teacher in Pittsburgh. We still exchange Christmas cards. She was the first teacher who said I was a good writer - and I'd never heard that before. And so I remember that, and I remember that level of loving the material and really loving writing about it. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Good
Teacher
History
" 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
" 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. "
Nathaniel Philbrick
Follow
Writing
Thinking
" 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
" '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
" 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