123 Quotes by Nathaniel Philbrick

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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