Best 20 quotes of Nathaniel Philbrick on MyQuotes

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

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

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

People think I live here on Nantucket and just gaze at the ocean, getting my inspiration. Not so. I work in my basement and gaze out onto a single window that shows me a cement wall. This is a profession, and it's important to have professionalism about the writing.

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.

You cannot underestimate the influence of Shakespeare.

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

As Starbuck discovers, simply being a good guy with a positive worldview is not enough to stop a force of nature like Ahab, who feeds on the fears and hatreds in us all.

Faint not, poor soul, in God still trust; Fear not the things thou suffer must; For, whom he loves he doth chastise, And then all tears wipes from their eyes. William Bradford Plymouth Colony Governor

For all they had suffered during those first terrible winters in America, their best years were behind them, in Leiden. Never again would they know the same rapturous sense of divine fellowship that had first launched them on this quest.

How much of assumed national and personal character comes from the fact that we have never truly known need to the point of having our character tested? Willing conscientious objectors underwent controlled starvation and confirmed how quickly it impacts the initiative and generosity we like to think of as "American" characteristics.

In an October 6 letter to Lord Stirling, he set forth the principle that would guide his increasingly sophisticated intelligence-gathering efforts. "As we are often obliged to reason the designs of the enemy from the appearances which come under our own observation and the information of our spies," Washington wrote, "we cannot be too attentive to these things which may afford us new light. Every minutia should have a place in our collection. For things of a seemingly trifling nature when conjoined with others of a more serious cast may lead to very valuable conclusions." But as Washington was to learn to his great regret, sometimes what were to become "the designs of the enemy" were developing in plain sight.

Many of the so-called American characteristics,’ a chronicler of the [WW2 University of Minnesota starvation] experiment wrote, ‘—abounding energy, generosity, optimism—become intelligible as the expected behavior response of a well-fed people.

Midshipman Edward Pellew was in the British boat right behind Arnold's. The American general had escaped, but in his haste he had left behind his stock and buckle, which Pellew took as a keepsake. Years later, by which time Pellew had become the much-decorated admiral Viscount Exmouth, he could not help but wonder how differently the War of Independence might have turned out if on that cold autumn day near the southern tip of Lake Champlain he had captured Benedict Arnold.

The moment any of them gave up on the difficult work of living with their neighbors--and all of the compromise, frustration, and delay that inevitably entailed--they risked losing everything.

Then I’ll haste to wed a sailor, and send him off to sea, For a life of independence, is the pleasant life for me. But every now and then I shall like to see his face, For it always seems to me to beam with manly grace, With his brow so nobly open, and his dark and kindly eye, Oh my heart beats fondly towards him whenever he is nigh. But when he says “Goodbye my love, I’m off across the sea,” First I cry for his departure, then laugh because I’m free. (“Nantucket Girl’s Song,” as recorded in Eliza Brock’s journal)

They were a most unusual group of colonists. Instead of noblemen, craftsmen, and servants - the types of people who had founded Jamestown in Virginia - these were, for the most part, families - men, women, and children who were willing to endure almost anything if it meant they could worship as they pleased.

This is where Melville is perhaps the most profound in his portrait of Ahab as the demagogue and dictator. In the end, even the fiercest of tyrants is done in, not by his own sad, used-up self, but by his enablers, the so-called professionals, who keep whispering in his ear." p.105

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.

To write timelessly about the here and now, a writer must approach the present indirectly. The story has to be about more than it at first seems. Shakespeare used the historical sources of his plays as a scaffolding on which to construct detailed portraits of his own age. The interstices between the secondhand historical plots and Shakespeare’s startlingly original insights into Elizabethan England are what allow his work to speak to us today. Reading Shakespeare, we know what it is like, in any age, to be alive. So it is with Moby-Dick, a novel about a whaling voyage to the Pacific that is also about America racing hell-bent toward the Civil War and so much more. Contained in the pages of Moby-Dick is nothing less than the genetic code of America: all the promises, problems, conflicts, and ideals that contributed to the outbreak of a revolution in 1775 as well as a civil war in 1861 and continue to drive this country’s ever-contentious march into the future. This means that whenever a new crisis grips this country, Moby-Dick becomes newly important. It is why subsequent generations have seen Ahab as Hitler during World War II or as a profit-crazed deep-drilling oil company in 2010 or as a power-crazed Middle Eastern dictator in 2011.