Top 14 Nantucket Quotes & Sayings

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.'

I'm from a little island off of Massachusetts, Nantucket. It's hard getting into the music business from there, but my parents took me to songwriting festivals because I would write and produce my own music.

Like environmentalists, politicians generally privilege flora and fauna over folks. (NIMBYs excepted. Senator Edward Kennedy is a not-in-my-backyard environmentalist: he opposes wind farms in Nantucket Sound, offshore from his Hyannis Port compound.)

I lived on Nantucket in college during the summer and have spent a lot of time there since. It's a special place for me.

Nantucket is a place where some kind of magic happens, it's where I met my husband 32 years ago, and we've been together since the day we met. It's the kind of place that when people come here, they think they'll be happy. I see people falling in love or recovering from some conflict here, and I wanted to capture that.

You see the pictures in the paper today of John Kerry windsurfing? He's at his home in Nantucket this week, doing his favorite thing, windsurfing. Even his hobby depends on which way the wind blows.

In 1981, when he ran for governor, I confiscated the needlepoint belts of New Jersey's Tom Kean. It's a patrician look that is right for the Vineyard, Nantucket, Darien, Greenwich, Charleston and Savannah.

Nantucket's English settlers, who first disembarked on the island in 1659, had been mindful of the sea's dangers. They had hoped to earn their livelihoods not as fishermen but as farmers and shepherds on this grassy isle dotted with ponds, where no wolves preyed.

People think I live here on Nantucket and just gaze at the ocean, getting my inspiration. Not so. I work in my basement and gaze out onto a single window that shows me a cement wall. This is a profession, and it's important to have professionalism about the writing.

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.

For me when I was growing up, some of the happiest times were when we went to a small island called Nantucket off Massachusetts.

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.

I want to make a boatload of money and i want to poof and maybe make it on the senior tour, live on islands, get a bigger Nantucket house.

Right whales - so named because they were 'the right whale to kill' - grazed the waters off Nantucket as if they were seagoing cattle, straining the nutrient-rich surface of the ocean through the bushy plates of baleen in their perpetually grinning mouths.