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" 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. "

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" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Miles

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

" As long as I can remember, I've been writing - first poems, then stories, and by my early teenage years I was also in love with sailing. "

" In my early 20s, I was a big fan of Theodore Dreiser and might be one of the few people on the planet who have voluntarily read all his novels. "

" A good leader has to at some point trust those around him; otherwise, nothing constructive is going to get done. "

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

" For me, the hardest thing in the world is how to start a book. "

" 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. "

" I hated the fact that I had to read 'Moby-Dick' as a senior in high school. "

" To my mind, an adventure is something a person willingly undertakes. "

" As a former English major, I have always been fascinated by the connections between literature and history. "

" We think of Washington as the defensive-minded pragmatist who won the Revolution by avoiding unnecessary risks on the battlefield. But that was not how he started out. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I do work-related stuff on airplanes. Then, when I'm in the hotel room or just vegging out, I read for pleasure. "

" 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. "

" For the very young, there's nothing better than Mother Goose and anything by Dr. Seuss for the rhythms and language. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm a big Stephen King fan. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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