A Quote by Nathaniel Philbrick

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.

Nathaniel Philbrick

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Aliens American American History Being Book Century Could Create Culture Earth Essentials Existed History History And Culture Instead Literature Midst Once Page Planet Planet Earth Repository Space Space Aliens Turner Use Western Whale

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Nathaniel Philbrick
American - Author
Born: June 11, 1956

I admire American literature, both contemporary and classic - 'Moby-Dick' is just about the best book in the world - and I admire British literature for its insistence on dealing with social class. It may have been an influence.

Per Petterson

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.

Nathaniel Philbrick

I'd like to play the whale in 'Moby Dick.' If I keep eating, I may end up getting there.

Richard Jenkins

Literature, the study of literature in English in the 19th century, did not belong to literary studies, which had to do with Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, but instead with elocution and public speaking. So when people read literature, it was to memorize and to recite it.

Robert Hass

This is an extremely ambitious book. In addition to science and mathematics, Byers brings to bear insights from literature, philosophy, religion, history, anthropology, medicine, and psychology. The Blind Spot breaks new ground, and represents a major step forward in the philosophy of science. The book is also a page-turner, which is rare for this topic.

Joseph Auslander

History will tell you that borders are not inevitable, they hardly existed at the end of the 19th century.

Rutger Bregman

For me, 'Moby-Dick' is more than the greatest American novel ever written; it is a metaphysical survival manual - the best guidebook there is for a literate man or woman facing an impenetrable unknown: the future of civilization in this storm-tossed 21st century.

Nathaniel Philbrick

It's incredible being a woman. I was, of course, fortunate to have an Irish mother who is an empowered woman. She comes from the western culture where women's rights and empowerment happened much earlier in the 19th century.

Amala Akkineni

Especially once those poetry events began, because, yeah, the stuff was still on the page, but the page was starting to spill into real space, spill into air, once you could hear it, once there was a typewriter, once there was a body of a typist, it was getting rid of the confines of the page.

Vito Acconci

There was once a time when art history and film were basically the same medium, but art history is frozen in late-19th-century technology that has survived into the early 21st century.

Robert Nelson

I was in school for literature, and read so many 19th century and early 20th century novels that it was hard to break out of that and read an average Jeanette Winterson book or something.

Colin Meloy

The thing about Moby Dick is that, at heart, it's a very simple plot - there's only one white whale in the ocean. When you're a boy growing up in a hostile home, you imagine it's unique: it's happening only to you.

Gavin O'Connor

The most important fact of this century is not that Earth is threatened in many ways, It is that for the first time in all of its history a decisive means of protecting the home planet exists. It is by using space.

William E. Burrows

On my second space walk, I was riding the Canadarm, heading down toward the payload bay of the space shuttle, and I could see the space shuttle highlighted against the Earth in the background, and there was this black, infinite, hostile void of space. I remember looking down at the Earth and thinking, "Beneath me is a 4½-billion-year-old planet, upon which the entire history of the human species has taken place." That was an incredibly humbling moment, and I had a bit of an epiphany.

Dafydd Williams

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.

Nathaniel Philbrick

No highbrow literary type would ever say 'Moby Dick' is good but it's just about a whale, or a Jane Austen would be important if she wasn't just writing about romantic relationships.

Sophie Hannah

A Quote by Nathaniel Philbrick

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