Nathaniel Philbrick · 466 pages
Rating: (8.1K votes)
“We interact with one another as individuals responding to a complex haze of factors: professional responsibilities, personal likes and dislikes, ambition, jealousy, self-interest, and, in at least some instances, genuine altruism. Living in the here and now, we are awash with sensations of the present, memories of the past, and expectations and fears for the future. Our actions are not determined by any one cause; they are the fulfillment of who we are at that particular moment. After that moment passes, we continue to evolve, to change, and our memories of that moment inevitably change with us as we live with the consequences of our past actions, consequences we were unaware of at the time.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, quote from The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
“Faint heart never won fair lady,” he wrote; “neither did it ever pursue and overtake an Indian village.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, quote from The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
“Odd things happen in a battle, and the human heart has strange and gruesome depths and the human brain still stranger shallows;”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, quote from The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
“Living in the here and now, we are awash with sensations of the present, memories of the past, and expectations and fears for the future. Our actions are not determined by any one cause; they are the fulfillment of who we are at that particular moment. After that moment passes, we continue to evolve, to change, and our memories of that moment inevitably change with us as we live with the consequences of our past actions, consequences we were unaware of at the time.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, quote from The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
“Custer wrote, “I often think I would greatly prefer to cast my lot among those of my people adhered to the free open plains rather than submit to the confined limits of a reservation, there to be the recipient of the blessed benefits of civilization, with its vices thrown in without stint or measure.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, quote from The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
“As Herman Melville wrote of that seagoing monster of a man Captain Ahab, “All mortal greatness is but disease.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, quote from The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
“fluidity of the sea, not the rigidity of irresistible law, characterizes human conduct, especially in the midst of a calamity.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, quote from The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
“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, quote from The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
“Over the next hundred years, more gold would be extracted from a single mine in the Black Hills (an estimated $1 billion) than from any other mine in the continental United States.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, quote from The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
“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, quote from The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
“I’ve always known that I had the happy facility of making enemies of any one I ever knew,”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, quote from The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
“a space of time is a great breeder of myths.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, quote from The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
“When an enlisted man sees his commanding officer lose his head entirely…,” Private Taylor wrote, “it would…demoralize anyone taught to breathe, almost, at the word of command.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, quote from The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
“Hindsight has a way of corrupting people’s memories, inviting them to view a past event not as it actually occurred but as they wished it had occurred given the ultimate result.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, quote from The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
“Custer did not drink; he didn’t have to. His emotional effusions unhinged his judgment in ways that went far beyond alcohol’s ability to interfere with clear thinking.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, quote from The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
“The future is never more important than to a people on the verge of a cataclysm.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, quote from The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
Nathaniel Philbrick
Born place: in Boston, The United States
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“Ty’s knee occasionally brushed against his under the table as they ate, but the conversation died down as the food was passed around. It was an odd, remarkable feeling, to be eating breakfast with Ty and his family and feel not only welcome, but like he might belong there.”--Zane”
― Abigail Roux, quote from Sticks & Stones
“But, look, it is good to have a dream so long as you do not let it gnaw at the substance of your present. I have seen men consumed by their dreams, and it is a sour business. If you cling too tightly to a dream—a poodle bitch or a personal sausage chef or whatever—then you miss the felicity of your heart beating and the smell of the grass growing and the sounds lizards make when you run through the neighborhood with our friend. Your dream should be like a favorite old bone that you savor and cherish and chew upon gently. Then, rather than stealing from you a wasted sigh or the life of an idle hour, it nourishes you, and you become strangely contented by nostalgia for a possible future, so juicy with possibility and redolent of sautéed garlic and decadent slabs of bacon that you feel full when you’ve eaten nothing. And then, one fine day when the sun smiles upon your snout, then the time is right, you bite down hard. The dream is yours. And then you
chew on the next one.”
― Kevin Hearne, quote from Hammered
“You, my dear, are getting curiouser and curiouser. Like Alice down the rabbit hole, nothing is as it appears.”
― Teri Terry, quote from Shattered
“They say when a calamity strikes you it stuns your normal senses so much that emotions are held in check. Perhaps that is what happened with me.”
― Preeti Shenoy, quote from Life is What You Make It: A Story of Love, Hope and How Determination Can Overcome Even Destiny
“I close my eyes, back straight, face impassive. When I look, I will see someone capable and composed, a warrior and a leader all in one.”
― Sara Raasch, quote from Ice Like Fire
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