Nathaniel Philbrick Quotes

I think people have the wrong idea of 'Moby Dick' as this somber, boring thing.

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

Bigotry is probably the thing I detest most.

Reading 'Moby-Dick' was really a sort of transformative literary experience for me.

We hate some persons because we do not know them; and will not know them because we hate them.

A general loathing of a gang or sect usually has some sound basis in instinct.

Whaling was the oil business of its day.

Many, many of my paintings have come from the first chapter of Moby Dick.

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.

My summer reading suggestion: Pick a really famous, really long novel.

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.

OK, he's a Yankees fan. Now I know why I don't like him.

I am astonished at the strong feeling of dislike and contempt—I might almost say hatred—which the bulk of the whites have for their black neighbours.

Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds.

I don't think I extend my hatred to other people's outfits.

I would absolutely not go out of my way to meet somebody who I felt has gone out of their way to not only show that they aren't a friend of a gay person but that they think that they're sick.

Captain Ahab drowned, he reminded himself; it was the trimmer, Ishmael, who survived.

It's a sin to hate, and for that reason alone, we must not hate the Normans... We can, however, thoroughly dislike them, Alice.

Don't introduce me to that man! I want to go on hating him, and I can't hate a man whom I know.

People hate those who make them feel their own inferiority.

And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody." "And yours," he replied with a smile, "is willfully to misunderstand them.

I read "Pride and Prejudice" [by Jane Austen]. I was gobsmacked by it - it's so funny and so modern. Unbelievable. You don't expect funny to come through after 200 years - humor doesn't transcend decades, let alone centuries.

How can two people hate so much without knowing each other?

Captain Ahab was a man possessed with an obsessional drive to pursue the white whale which had harmed him - which had torn his leg out - to the ends of the Earth, no matter what happened. In the final scene of the novel, Captain Ahab is being borne out to sea, wrapped around the white whale with the rope of his own harpoon and going obviously to his death. It was a scene of almost suicidal finality.

Commonly we say a judgment falls upon a man for something in him we cannot abide.