Nathaniel Philbrick
Author
1956-06-11
Quotes by Nathaniel Philbrick
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To be in the presence of a great leader is to know a blighted soul who has managed to make the darkness work for him. Ishmael says it best: For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but a disease. In chapter 36, The Quarter-Deck, Melville show us how susceptible we ordinary people are to the seductive power of a great and demented man.
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To be in the presence of a great leader is to know a blighted soul who has managed to make the darkness work for him. Ishmael says it best: For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but a disease. In chapter 36, The Quarter-Deck, Melville show us how susceptible we ordinary people are to the seductive power of a great and demented man.
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I'm a big Stephen King fan.
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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.
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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.
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I follow the Patriots, but the Steelers were my first and true love. I still have a 'Terrible Towel.'
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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.
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In all natural disasters through time, man needs to attach meaning to tragedy, no matter how random and inexplicable the event is.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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