A Quote by Nathaniel Philbrick

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.' — © Nathaniel Philbrick
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.'
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.
Louisiana loses 30 miles a year off our coast. We lost 100 miles last year off our coast thanks to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. We have lost a size of land equivalent to the entire state of Rhode Island.
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.
If we don't act, drilling will be allowed only 3 miles off Florida's east coast beaches.
When I was a little kid, I used to walk miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles of railroad tracks.
When I was in the gunner's bubble of a B25 bomber, taking off from an aircraft carrier 100 miles off the coast of San Diego, I remember saying to myself how amazing it was to get the chance to do that.
If you want to know why the coast is such an inspirational place, ask Herman Melville, Jack London, Nordhoff and Hall, Robert Louis Stevenson or Joseph Conrad. It's a glimpse of eternity. It invites rumination, the relentless whisper of the tide against the shore.
I think I was just trying to coast and you can't coast and try and win at the same time, you know? It'll be three years now since those wins, but the last couple of years I've just really been trying to put my miles in, get them up there to 80 miles a week, 90 miles a week and put the work in again.
When you're on a boat, 15 nautical miles off the coast and you're with a bunch of fishermen, they don't give two shits about who you are.
For me when I was growing up, some of the happiest times were when we went to a small island called Nantucket off Massachusetts.
The way an old dog finds his way back over miles and miles to his home when somebody trues to shove him off on a farm someplace, that is how I find my way back to the library. It's my place, even more than my place is.
Thanks to the invention of the telescope, planets that are 100 billion miles away look to be only 50 billion miles away.
We've sent a man to the moon and that's 29,000 miles away. The center of the Earth is only 4,000 miles away. You could drive that in a week but for some reason nobody's ever done it.
To me the biggest waste of time is commuting. First, there is no place that is less than a two-hour commute from New York. You can be half a mile outside of the city limits; you're two hours away by car. I don't care how close they tell you it is. "Oh, it's only thirty miles." Thirty miles? At 8:30 in the morning, thirty miles outside New York, you might as well be starting out in Omaha.
Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.
The thing to keep in mind is that we're still in the very early days when it comes to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Saying there's a silence is a bit like if Columbus, looking to discover a new continent, only sailed 10 miles off the coast of Spain before turning back to say, 'Nothing out there!'
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