Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

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

Writing

Thinking

" 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

Philadelphia

Conservative

" 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. "

" Reading 'Moby-Dick' helps you discover how to live. "

" I'll watch anything, from action to art films. "

" He was born in 1741, a descendant of the Rhode Island equivalent of royalty. The first Benedict Arnold had been one of the colony's founders, and subsequent generations had helped to establish the Arnolds as solid and respected citizens. "

" In all natural disasters through time, man needs to attach meaning to tragedy, no matter how random and inexplicable the event is. "

" I follow the Patriots, but the Steelers were my first and true love. I still have a 'Terrible Towel.' "

Nathaniel Philbrick

True

True Love

" When I was at Brown, I wanted to write the great American novel, but I was too scared to take a creative course. I signed up for one, got in, and just didn't have the courage to go. I was a tremendously shy person, almost pathologically shy. The thought of peers critiquing my work - oh, God. "

" In the years to come, the combination of climate change and population growth could have a devastating effect on the planet and, needless to say, on humanity. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" Whaling was the oil business of its day. "

" You cannot underestimate the influence of Shakespeare. "

" 'Johnny Tremain,' Paul Revere's Ride, today's Tea Partiers - you have to tune all that out to get at the real story. "

" 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. "

" Martin Scorsese, everything he does, I've got to see. And Jack Nicholson, I've got to see what he does. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I watch a lot of bad TV. I spend my entire day reading and writing, and after dinner my idea of fun is just to watch a lot of bad TV. That's how I relax and stay in touch with modern culture. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I was an English major at Brown. I never enjoyed history classes. "