Nathaniel Philbrick Quotes

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  • Author
  • born 1956
  • 66 quotes

Nathaniel Philbrick, an author (born 1956), is quoted 66 times on QuoteForever. The subjects that come up most often are English Major, Whaling, Population and Whale.

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I'm a big Stephen King fan.

Whaling was the oil business of its day.

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

You cannot underestimate the influence of Shakespeare.

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

As an author of narrative history, I read a lot of history books.

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

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

Even though I hadn't read a word of it, I grew up hating 'Moby-Dick.'

You know, if you're at home with children, you lose twenty-five IQ points.

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

By 1760, the Nantucketers had virtually exterminated the local whale population.

I'm not one of these people who want to tear down our heroes and that kind of thing.

Joseph Warren, like a lot of revolutionary leaders, was into Enlightenment literature.

I follow the Patriots, but the Steelers were my first and true love. I still have a terrible towel.

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

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

History is obviously dependent on the evidence, and it's always amazing to me how much evidence there is.

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

As Herman Melville wrote of that seagoing monster of a man Captain Ahab, “All mortal greatness is but disease.

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

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

'Moby-Dick' has a remarkable way of resonating with whatever is going on in the world at that particular moment.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Something like going to get the newspaper can increase your writing efficiency by taking you away from the material. When I'm doing other things, writing stuff will be swirling around in my head, and sometimes I'll see a new way into the material.

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.

The great lesson I get from 'Moby-Dick' is that when the times are bad, when there is great foreboding, there are still ways to go about living. It's through Ishmael that I find a kind of overall cosmic approach to a meaningful life in this meaningless world.

Nathaniel Philbrick is quoted on

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