Atoll Quotes & Sayings

I am a bomb but I mean you no harm. That I still am here to tell this, is a miracle: I was deployed on May 15, 1957, but I didn't go off because a British nuclear engineer, a young father, developed qualms after seeing pictures of native children marveling at the mushrooms in the sky, and sabotaged me. I could see why during that short drop before I hit the atoll: the island looks like god's knuckles in a bathtub, the ocean is beautifully translucent, corals glow underwater, a dead city of bones, allowing a glimpse into a white netherworld. I met the water and fell a few feet into a chromatic cemetery. The longer I lie here, listening to my still functioning electronic innards, the more afraid I grow of detonating after all this time. I don't share your gods, but I pray I shall die a silent death. — Marcus Speh

The barrier standing between you and the life you are capable of living is a lack of consistent execution. Effective execution will set you free. It is the path to accomplish the things you desire. — Brian P. Moran

Your heart like a hawk-mouth in the sun, your heart like a ship on an atoll, your heart like a compass needle driven mad by a little piece of lead, like washing drying in the wind, like a whining of horses, like seed thrown to the birds, like an evening paper one has finished reading! Your heart is a charade that the whole world has guessed. — Louis Aragon

He holds the elevator door open with one enormous hand and leans out to look at the weather. Then he swings those dark blue eyes to mine, his brow beginning to crease. The familiar bubble forms in my head. I wish he was my friend. I burst it with a pin. "I'll give you a ride," he forces out. "Ugh, no way," I say over my shoulder and run. — Sally Thorne

Since birds took flight, they were closer to the spirit world than man was, so ignoring a message from a bird might mean missing some warning or promise from powers greater than oneself. — Jodi Picoult

No, we always had something to do because I did all the wave runners and jet skis and boats approaching the atolls and stuff like that, so you could do that without showing the actual atoll or the set that you're going towards, but detailing all those guys racing towards it. — David R. Ellis

She covered his hand with hers over her abdomen. His was so much bigger than hers and had probably fired guns, rifles, and god knew what else, but right here, right now, his tenderness broke down her will as sure as any grenade. — Lisa Kessler

Whatever's wrong, you know if it's worth fixing or not. If it is, then fix it. If not, leave it alone and move on. If I raised you to be strong, then that means I didn't teach you to sit around and wait on life and happiness to happen to you. You go after it, Macy.
And if something is standing in your way, you go through it. — Cherrie Lynn

Virtue, in this strict sense, is what happens when someone has made a thousand small choices, requiring effort and concentration, to do something which is good and right but which doesn't "come naturally" - and then, on the thousand and first time, when it really matters, they find that they do what's required "automatically," as we say. — N. T. Wright

Target launch date for Falcon I maiden flight is Halloween(October 31) from our island launch complex in the Kwajalein Atoll. For potential customers out there, I should mention that Kwajalein has some of the worlds best scuba diving and snorkeling! It is literally a tropical paradise. — Elon Musk

That bomb that took down that Russian airliner may have been the size of a soda can. And that bomb killed more people than all the Paris attackers combined. So this is still a grave threat. — Adam Schiff

If you live on an atoll and you get a warning by radio that a big wave is coming and everyone is told to move to higher ground, where are you supposed to go on these islands? There is none. The highest ground is four-meters (around 13 feet) above sea level, meaning you'd be safer in a coconut tree. How, though, are you supposed to get your grandfather, grandmother and grandchildren up there? — Enele Sopoaga

The model of a composer. — Benjamin Britten

Most of all, he was tired of being a holdout, a sole survivor, the last coconut hanging on the last palm tree on the last little atoll in the path of the great wave of late-modern capitalism, waiting to be hammered flat. — Michael Chabon

There's a much bigger picture beyond surfing, its part of an ocean culture. Everything comes back to Mother Nature. Surfing is a way of connecting, and saying thanks. — Tristan Prettyman

Wherever you come near the human race there's layers and layers of nonsense. — Thornton Wilder

The United States, a signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention, destroyed the last of its stocks of VX and other chemical agents on the Johnston Atoll, 825 miles southwest of Hawaii, in November 2000. — Barton Gellman

Yet they are unmoved when told of the cruel blow that fortune has dealt them, happy to see out their days on this unknown and unspoiled atoll. They will tell you that the view from their windows is infinitely more magnificent than Manhattan's glittering skyline. — Giles Milton

If you would wish the dog to follow you, feed him — Henry George Bohn

Sometime later the islanders on a little rimward atoll were amazed to find, washed into their little local lagoon, the wave-rocked corpse of a hideous sea monster, all beaks, eyes and tentacles. They were further astonished at its size, since it was rather larger than their village. But their surprise was tiny compared to the huge, stricken expression on the face of the dead monster, which appeared to be have been trampled to death. — Terry Pratchett

In ancient Boeotia brides were carried home in vehicles whose wheels were burned at the door, in token, that they would never again be needed. — Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Setting aside embassies, consulates and military bases, Rose Atoll of American Samoa is the southernmost point of U.S. controlled territory. Guam, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, and half a dozen other islands are all further south than Ka Lae.
While Ka Lae is not the southermost point of the United States, it is the southernmosr point of the fifty states. — John Richard Stephens

Of course, if we were lucky, we wouldn't be getting chased by an army of zombies through the quarantine area that used to be downtown Santa Cruz. We'd be somewhere safer, like Bikini Atoll just before the bomb testing kicked off. — Mira Grant

It's very rare to see an undisturbed birth in a modern U.S. teaching hospital, but when you see a woman who isn't frightened, who's giving birth without interference, you stand back in awe and realize how little needed you are except in the rare circumstance. — Ina May Gaskin