Quotes & Sayings About Caribbean Islands

The Cayman Islands, a British Crown colony in the Caribbean, for instance, is the fifth largest banking center in the world, — Michel Chossudovsky

I sometimes detect that a type of regional divide is setting in, and there is a lack of real Caribbean connection among the islands, and I am concerned about this. — Anthony Carmona

In the Caribbean islands, especially in Jamaica, have I found a country similar to South Africa plus the racial freedom I had sought so long. — Peter Abrahams

I meet a lot of characters in the
islands, people who're running
who're
happier on a fishing boat than they
are back home.When I first got
down there,I don't know if I was
running from a real bad heartbreak
or running to something I thought
would make me feel better.But
since I've been spending time in
the Caribbean, I've come to realize
that I've got nothing to run from. — Kenny Chesney

I have only ever been to Antigua to hop over to other Caribbean islands. The airport had always seemed perfectly lovely, but I'm a quiet sort of holiday girl, and Antigua always seemed big. — Jane Green

I don't buy a lot of things. I like to create things. I've been lucky enough to be able to build my beautiful island in the Caribbean. I certainly haven't regretted that. — Richard Branson

The West Indian is not exactly hostile to change, but he is not much inclined to believe in it. This comes from a piece of wisdom that his climate of eternal summer teaches him. It is that, under all the parade of human effort and noise, today is like yesterday, and tomorrow will be like today; that existence is a wheel of recurring patterns from which no one escapes; that all anybody does in this life is live for a while and then die for good, without finding out much; and that therefore the idea is to take things easy and enjoy the passing time under the sun. The white people charging hopefully around the islands these days in the noon glare, making deals, bulldozing airstrips, hammering up hotels, laying out marinas, opening new banks, night clubs, and gift shops, are to him merely a passing plague. They have come before and gone before. — Herman Wouk

How did Italy manage to end up with no Caribbean islands at all? Christopher Columbus took the trouble to discover the Caribbean personally before the end of the fifteenth century. Try to get a decent plate of spaghetti there now. — Calvin Trillin

Southern culture is vivified, made a culture, by the melding of influences that are held far more closely than in other, lesser parts of the country: in the Southland, the past is not really past, and the ancestral homelands are not so far away as they are elsewhere, paradoxically: the assimilation of Southerners, unlike the uneasy attempts at assimilation of Americans elsewhere, has created a culture in which the old influences in our blood, of the Ivory Coast, Languedoc, the Highlands, Wales, Antrim, and Devon, of Sephardic communities from Amsterdam to Cadiz, of the Caribbean sugar islands and Castile, have been absorbed into the fabric of New World life. — Markham Shaw Pyle

Columbus's real achievement was managing to cross the ocean successfully in both directions. Though an accomplished enough mariner, he was not terribly good at a great deal else, especially geography, the skill that would seem most vital in an explorer. It would be hard to name any figure in history who has achieved more lasting fame with less competence. He spent large parts of eight years bouncing around Caribbean islands and coastal South America convinced that he was in the heart of the Orient and that Japan and China were at the edge of every sunset. He never worked out that Cuba is an island and never once set foot on, or even suspected the existence of, the landmass to the north that everyone thinks he discovered: the United States. — Bill Bryson

Again, some scholars try to exonerate Homo sapiens and blame climate change (which requires them to posit that, for some mysterious reason, the climate in the Caribbean islands remained static for 7,000 years while the rest of the western hemisphere warmed). But in America, the dung ball cannot be dodged. We are the culprits. There is no way around that truth. Even if climate change abetted us, the human contribution was decisive.7 Noah's — Yuval Noah Harari

When you're on one of the Caribbean islands, sometimes it's hard to picture how they fit in with the rest, but when you see them all joined together like a necklace from space, you see the natural geographic connectedness of them all. — Chris Hadfield

Early Trans-Atlantic Voyages
"Since Columbus' discovery of the islands in the Caribbean, the number of Spanish ships that ventured west across the Atlantic had consistently increased. For reasons of safety in numbers, the ships usually made the transit in convoys, carrying nobility, public servants and conquistadors on the larger galleons that had a crew of 180 to 200. On these ships a total of 40 to 50 passengers had their own cabins amidships. These ships carried paintings, finished furniture, fabric and, of course, gold on the return trip. The smaller vessels including the popular caravels had a crew of only 30, but carried as many people as they could fit in the cargo holds. Normally they would carry about 100 lesser public servants, soldiers, and settlers, along with farm animals and equipment, seeds, plant cuttings and diverse manufactured goods. — Hank Bracker

Half the people in London were not English anyway: they were Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Caribbean, Indian and Chinese. All the drug dealers came from islands: Maltese men sold pep pills, — Ken Follett

These changes occurred just as the Spanish conquest of the Caribbean islands and the Portuguese settlement of the Brazilian subcontinent was getting under way and thus opened the American market for African slaves. The decimation of the native Arawak and Carib peoples in the Caribbean islands, the first major zone of European settlement, especially encouraged the early experimentation with African slave labor. — Herbert S. Klein

Forty years ago, Richard Branson, who ultimately founded Virgin Air, found himself in a similar situation in an airport in the Caribbean. They had just canceled his flight, the only flight that day. Instead of freaking out about how essential the flight was, how badly his day was ruined, how his entire career was now in jeopardy, the young Branson walked across the airport to the charter desk and inquired about the cost of chartering a flight out of Puerto Rico. Then he borrowed a portable blackboard and wrote, "Seats to Virgin Islands, $39." He went back to his gate, sold enough seats to his fellow passengers to completely cover his costs, and made it home on time. Not to mention planting the seeds for the airline he'd start decades later. Sounds like the kind of person you'd like to hire — Seth Godin

Slave ships landed more than 1.5 million African captives on British Caribbean islands (primarily Jamaica and Barbados) by the late 1700s and had brought more than 2 million to Brazil. In North America, however, the numbers of the enslaved grew, except in the most malarial lowlands of the Carolina rice country. By 1775, 500,000 of the thirteen colonies' 2.5 million inhabitants were slaves, about the same as the number of slaves then alive in the British Caribbean colonies. Slave labor was crucial to the North American colonies. Tobacco shipments from the — Edward E. Baptist

The chief character in this narrative is the Caribbean Sea, one of the world's most alluring bodies of water, a rare gem among the oceans, defined by the islands that form a chain of lovely jewels to the north and east — James A. Michener

So far, I've only sailed in the Caribbean. I've sailed the Virgin Island and The Grenadines. I liked all that. We charted some really crummy boats in the Grenadines. That made for an exciting sailing trip (laughs) when everything goes well. When everything goes well. When sails rip, engines freeze up and you find there are organisms growing inside the diesel, it's terrible and amazing stuff. — Bill Murray

Through it all, this wild life on and off the road , through Jordanian deserts , Spanish islands, German prisons, Caribbean tax scams, halls of fame,wine, women, and all the drugs under the sun - one constant companion has never abandoned me . My first true love : singing Its been the savior of many poor boy, and God I know I'm one — Eric Burdon

My mother is Afro-Caribbean and my father is Caucasian-American, and I was born in Pennsylvania and moved to the Cayman Islands when I was about 2. So I grew up there with my mother, and it's really all I know. I grew up there until it was time to go to college, and that's when I moved back to America. — Grace Gealey