A Quote by Nathaniel Philbrick

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.
My dad is an ob-gyn - he's retired now - and he wanted to come to the States to make a better life, for opportunity. My mom said that, on the plane ride here, I did not want to speak a word of English - I spoke Tagalog. And then, after the first day of school, I didn't want to speak anything but English.
If you are not a Dukie, and Duke is having a lot of success year after year, you might get tired of it. They might not like your competing personality or competing persona, and if you are not a Dukie, or you don't love Duke or Christian Laettner, then I can understand the hating on me.
I feel like we have so much to add to this book called the American Dream, and I want to add our chapter to it. I want to talk about what it means to be brown American and this concept of what I feel is the New Brown America.
I love entertaining people, I love playing music, and I love rocking like an animal. But at a certain point, you're playing gig after gig after gig, in town after town after town, and you're lying down, staring at another hotel-room ceiling, and it's like, 'I want to be home. I'm a dad. I've got kids.'
This is a devastating problem, is, the longer our children are in school, the worse they do. Year after year after year, our children in America are falling further behind. Our 3- and 4-year-olds enter kindergarten OK, and they fall further and further behind. Each year, children in other countries are learning more than children in this country. And so the gap between American student performance in Singapore and Finland and South Korea and Canada and these other countries, the gap widens year after year after year.
What I like best about baseball is the continuity. Generation after generation can follow the game and get the same satisfactions year after year and bring to it the same interest and spirit. I want to take that with me into the next century.
The English tourist in American literature wants above all things something different from what he has at home. For this reason the one American writer whom the English whole-heartedly admire is Walt Whitman. There, you will hear them say, is the real American undisguised. In the whole of English literature there is no figure which resembles his - among all our poetry none in the least comparable to Leaves of Grass
Is it true that the American people are war-weary? Absolutely. We are tired of sending our sons and daughters to distant lands year after year after year, to give their lives trying to transform foreign nations.
I think of legacy: I want plaques on the wall. I want a farm for my dad. I want an orphanage, preferably two, named after my mother. I want to positively and tangibly help the lives of millions of people and die a legend.
It was no accident, no coincidence, that the seasons came round and round year after year. It was the Lord speaking to us all and showing us over and over again the birth, life, death, and resurrection of his only begotten Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ, our Lord. It was like a best-loved story being told day after day with each sunrise and sunset, year after year with the seasons, down through the ages since time began.
I'm trying to be among the elite night after night, year after year. I just want to be the best ... and I love winning.
When I came to America, I was already a writer, already published in Bosnia. I was planning to go back, but I had no choice but to stay here after the civil war, so I enrolled at Northwestern in a master's program and studied American literature.
I think soon after I became director of the CIA - President Obama pulled me into the Oval Office and said: 'Look, I just want you to know that your top priority is to go after Osama bin Laden.'
Our hearts are continuously rebellious. Every time we sin in thought, word, or deed, we're essentially saying in that moment that, "I don't need you God. I don't want you God. I like my way better than your way." If this goes on day after day after day, year after year, month after month, it would understandable for God to say, "I've given you ten trillion tries. You're finished." But it's not. So in that sense, His grace is always surprising, never ceases to be amazing and His mercy is remarkably outrageous.
Remember, I have a Ph.D. in English literature.
English is, from my point of view as an Americanist, an ethnicity. And English literature should be studied in Comparative Literature. And American literature should be a discipline, certainly growing from England and France, Germany, Spain, Denmark, and the Native traditions, particularly because those helped form the American canon. Those are our backgrounds. And then we'd be doing it the way it ought to be done. And someday I hope that it will be.
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