Top 100 Philbrick's Quotes
#1. Nathaniel Philbrick's 'In the Heart of the Sea' has rightfully taken its place as a classic for its literary merits. It has a special place in the cannibalism canon as well.
Mitchell Zuckoff
#2. I know who the real hero is, and it isn't me or brave Lanaya. It's an old man with a white beard and a walking stick and a heart so big it won't let him stop thinking he can change the world by writing down things in a book no one will ever read.
Rodman Philbrick
#4. I follow the Patriots, but the Steelers were my first and true love. I still have a 'Terrible Towel.'
Nathaniel Philbrick
#5. Soon after publishing a book for kids, my mailbox began to fill with letters from children all across America. Not because my novels for young readers are bestsellers - they're not by a long shot - but because today's kids love to write to authors.
Rodman Philbrick
#6. Many of us came away from our youth thinking that the story of the Revolution was that the Americans were patriots fighting the oppressive British. It was kind of good versus evil, liberty versus tyranny. When you get into it, you find that it was much more complicated.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#7. A survival tale peels away the niceties and comforts of civilization. Suddenly, all the technology and education in the world means nothing. I think all of us wonder while reading a survival tale, 'What would I have done in this situation? Would I have made it?'
Nathaniel Philbrick
#9. Faint heart never won fair lady," he wrote; "neither did it ever pursue and overtake an Indian village.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#10. In his opinion, humans were best when miserable, and so he had worked at being miserable his whole life, and in his generous way tried to make as many people miserable as possible.
Rodman Philbrick
#11. wishing thee a short and prosperous voyage, with a full portion of happiness we remain thy friends. In
Nathaniel Philbrick
#12. What a goon, except it really is funny, me trying to sneeze a hot dog through my nose, and we're both laughing like total morons.
Rodman Philbrick
#13. Every word is part of a picture, Every sentence is a picture. All you have to do is link them together.
Rodman Philbrick
#16. Remembering is just an invention of the mind ... It means that if you want to, you can remember anything, whether it happened or not ... You don't need a time machine if you can remember.
Rodman Philbrick
#17. So long as you tell a story that falls within the fairly generous boundaries of the suspense novel, you're free to make the novel as good as you can. You're allowed to challenge the reader. You can experiment with voice and style.
Rodman Philbrick
#18. fluidity of the sea, not the rigidity of irresistible law, characterizes human conduct, especially in the midst of a calamity.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#20. I was never forced to write. At least, I was never forced or even encouraged to write fiction. Creative writing wasn't in the curriculum at my school when I was in sixth grade.
Rodman Philbrick
#22. There is no greater compliment for a writer than to have pleased a troubled child.
Rodman Philbrick
#23. In all natural disasters through time, man needs to attach meaning to tragedy, no matter how random and inexplicable the event is.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#25. I don't have any of the answers, son. Never did. All I can do is keep asking the questions. Keep trying to make sense of why people do what they do.
Rodman Philbrick
#26. Expel the object!" Freak shouts. "Regurgitate, you big moron!" and he gives me another thump and I cough up this yucky mess, but I'm still laughing so hard my nose is running.
Rodman Philbrick
#27. READING, beaming up into books" -Kevin 'Freak' from Freak's Dictionary
"Freak the Mighty by Rodman Philbrick pg 167
Rodman Philbrick
#28. the greatest danger to America's future came from self-serving opportunism masquerading as patriotism. At
Nathaniel Philbrick
#29. I think in some way it's like that for all of us, living with the ghosts of things that used to be, or never were. We're all of us haunted by yesterday, and we got no choice but to keep marching into our tomorrows.
Rodman Philbrick
#30. I never had a brain until Freak came along and let me borrow his for awhile, and that's the truth, the whole truth. The unvanquished truth, is how Freak would say it, and for a long time it was him who did the talking.
Rodman Philbrick
#31. Melville's example demonstrates the wisdom of waiting to read the classics. Coming to a great book on your own after having accumulated essential life experience can make all the difference.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#32. You can take him, right?" he asks a couple minutes later.
I go, "Are you kidding? You can't just fight Blade, you have to fight his gang, too."
"You mean you couldn't take him and I was giving him lip?
Rodman Philbrick
#33. I watch a lot of bad TV. I spend my entire day reading and writing, and after dinner my idea of fun is just to watch a lot of bad TV. That's how I relax and stay in touch with modern culture.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#34. I wrote Freak the Mighty because Max, the mighty half of Freak the Mighty, insisted and he's bigger than I am.
Rodman Philbrick
#35. As a young, ambitious novelist, writing for kids never crossed my mind.
Rodman Philbrick
#37. Chase's ability to adjust his manner of leadership to the needs of his men begs comparison to one of the greatest and most revered leaders of all time, Sir Ernest Shackleton.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#38. The only real treasure is in your head. Memories are better than diamonds and nobody can steal them from you
Rodman Philbrick
#39. I consider myself a writer who happens to write about history, rather than a historian. I was an English major in college. What I've learned about history is in the field, so to speak. Going into the archives and working with it directly.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#40. That does it. It can't be true love. Mr. Willow has eyes like a sick kitten. You might love a sick kitten but you don't marry it, you keep it as a pet.
Rodman Philbrick
#41. I've always known that writing plays is very difficult, because I've written three or four that have never been produced.
Rodman Philbrick
#42. MASSIVES, fat heads who assume that television tells the truth" -Kevin 'Freak' from Freak's Dictionary
"Freak the Mighty by Rodman Philbrick pg 165
Rodman Philbrick
#43. Bean finds the best apple in our tree and hands it up to me. "You know what this tastes like when you first bite into it?" she asks.
"No, what?"
"Blue sky."
"You're zoomed."
"You ever eat blue sky?"
"No," I admit.
"Try it sometime," she says. "It's apple-flavored.
Rodman Philbrick
#44. ...her hull might be compared to a fat man on the short end of a lopsided seesaw
Philbrick, Nathaniel
#47. As a former English major, I have always been fascinated by the connections between literature and history.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#48. Paul Revere Jr., with whom I had lunch at Spanky's Clam Shack in Hyannis, Massachusetts.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#49. I am an avid fisherman, and my daily schedule is to write in the morning and then go fishing in the afternoon. In Maine, I fish mostly for stripers, and in the Florida Keys, I go after all kinds of game fish.
Rodman Philbrick
#51. Unfortunately, the author of a book pretty much gives up control of the story when the producers take over a book to make it into a movie.
Rodman Philbrick
#52. BOOK, a four-letter word for truth serum" -Kevin 'Freak' from Freak's Dictionary
"Freak the Mighty by Rodman Philbrick pg 161
Rodman Philbrick
#53. Dead man has nothin' to lose, nothin' to be feared of. Now I'm back among the living and scared to death about what happens next.
- Samuel Reed
Rodman Philbrick
#54. I assumed 'Freak the Mighty' was probably too weird and melodramatic to find a publisher. I certainly never expected the book to have a profound influence on my career as a writer, but indeed it has.
Rodman Philbrick
#55. 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
#56. As long as I can remember, I've been writing - first poems, then stories, and by my early teenage years I was also in love with sailing.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#58. I've always known that I had the happy facility of making enemies of any one I ever knew,
Nathaniel Philbrick
#60. 'Moby-Dick' has a remarkable way of resonating with whatever is going on in the world at that particular moment.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#61. As Herman Melville wrote of that seagoing monster of a man Captain Ahab, "All mortal greatness is but disease.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#62. Soon after, Tom, all of twenty years old, became the only soldier in the Civil War to win two Medals of Honor. In
Nathaniel Philbrick
#63. As a writer, I'm convinced that encouraging children to write fiction, to hook into that marvelous machine called the imagination, has to be good for everyone.
Rodman Philbrick
#64. No matter how much the inhabitants might try to hide it, there was a savagery about this island, a bloodlust and pride that bound every mother, father, and child in a clannish commitment to the hunt.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#65. In the years to come, the combination of climate change and population growth could have a devastating effect on the planet and, needless to say, on humanity.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#66. I have vivid memories of junior high school. I didn't quite know how to deal with kids and make friends and all of that. If you talked to people who knew me at the time, they'd think I was a popular kid in school. But boy, I didn't feel that.
Rodman Philbrick
#67. 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
#68. 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.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#69. The great lesson I get from 'Moby-Dick' is that when the times are bad, when there is great foreboding, there are still ways to go about living. It's through Ishmael that I find a kind of overall cosmic approach to a meaningful life in this meaningless world.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#70. I wanted to make the world of 'The Last Book in the Universe' as real as possible, so I spent a lot of time thinking about it. I decided the world would be a very different place, but people would be pretty much the same.
Rodman Philbrick
#71. What surprised me most about the Donner tragedy was that, given the terrible circumstances, how anyone survived at all.
Rodman Philbrick
#72. I started writing stories in sixth grade. But writing wasn't cool, like being good at sports, or being part of the in crowd, or winning fights on the playground.
Rodman Philbrick
#73. After seventeen days, one of the crew suggested that they cast lots. As it turned out, the lot fell to the man who had originally made the proposal, and after lots were cast again to see who should execute him, he was killed and eaten.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#74. Do not despair, my friend. Today is theirs, but the future is ours
Rodman Philbrick
#75. There was a saying on the island: "[I]t is a pity to spoil a good mate by making him a master.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#77. Something like going to get the newspaper can increase your writing efficiency by taking you away from the material. When I'm doing other things, writing stuff will be swirling around in my head, and sometimes I'll see a new way into the material.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#78. I could tell you all the medical terminology,' She says. 'But what finally happened is his heart got to big for his body'
Rodman Philbrick
#79. I'm thinking maybe letting the latches burn is the right idea. Let everything burn until there's nothing left but ashes and cool rain.
Rodman Philbrick
#80. Enthusiasm is big. When I write a book, it's a three-year commitment. Toward the end, I'm writing seven days a week, and it's exhausting but thrilling. The only hope is to have some real enthusiasm for the book ... Above all, you need some strong emotional or personal connection to your material.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#81. If half of the two thousand warriors fired ten arrows each during the engagement, that would have been a total of ten thousand arrows,
Nathaniel Philbrick
#82. Odd things happen in a battle, and the human heart has strange and gruesome depths and the human brain still stranger shallows;
Nathaniel Philbrick
#85. The act of self-expression - through writing a journal or letters - often enables a survivor to distance himself from his fears.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#87. After I had written more than a dozen adult genre novels, an editor I knew in New York asked me to write a mystery for young adults.
Rodman Philbrick
#89. Books are like truth serum
if you don't read, you can't figure out what's real.
Rodman Philbrick
#90. You don't need a time machine if you know how to remember.
Rodman Philbrick
#91. This mortal life decays apace How soon the bubble's broke Adam and all his numerous race Are Vanity and Smoke.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#92. Writing can't be too calculated. My best writing is when I set it aside, move on. It's not when I'm crafting a sentence, thinking about what word should follow another.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#93. You can't mess around with young readers - you have to cut straight to the heart of the story. The character can be complex, the plot can have some surprises, but the emotions have to be clear.
Rodman Philbrick
#94. Whatever you read, there's no better place to read than the cockpit or the berth of a boat. It's kind of like being in a womb.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#95. One of the questions I face when working on a book about a historical event is whether I should visit the actual place that I'm writing about. No matter how scrupulously maintained a historic house or battlefield may be, it is nothing like it was in the long-ago past.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#96. It's fun to be amazing, to be the star of the show, to have everyone watching you - even if you have to act like a pig.
Rodman Philbrick
#97. It all boils down to this: A person has only two options in life, to do something or to do nothing.
Rodman Philbrick
#98. When I was at Brown, I wanted to write the great American novel, but I was too scared to take a creative course. I signed up for one, got in, and just didn't have the courage to go. I was a tremendously shy person, almost pathologically shy. The thought of peers critiquing my work - oh, God.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#99. A Puritan believed it was necessary to venture back to the absolute beginning of Christianity, before the church had been corrupted by centuries of laxity and abuse, to locate divine truth.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#100. Faint not, poor soul, in God still trust;
Fear not the things thou suffer must;
For, whom he loves he doth chastise,
And then all tears wipes from their eyes.
William Bradford
Plymouth Colony Governor
Nathaniel Philbrick
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