Coral Island Book Quotes & Sayings

O' beautiful for spacious skies
But now those skies are threatening
They're beating plowshares into swords
For this tired old man that we elected king
Armchair warriors often fail
And we've been poisoned by these fairy tales
The lawyers clean up all details
Since daddy had to lie
But I know a place where we can go
And wash away this sin
We'll sit and watch the clouds roll by
And the tall grass wave in the wind
Just lay your head back on the ground
And let your hair spill all around me
Offer up your best defence
But this is the end
This is the end of the innocence — Don Henley

The beauty and magnitude of a diva's voice resides, so the iconography suggests, in her deformity. Her voice is beautiful because she herself is not-and her ugliness is interpreted as a sign of moral and social deviance. Reading biographies of divas, I can't ignore the repeated references to physical flaws-for example, Benedetta Pisaroni's "features horribly disfigured by small-pox," prompting spectators to shut their eyes "so as to hear without being condemned to see." Audiences speculated that Maria Malibran was not anatomically a woman, but an androgyne or hermaphrodite-an aberrant physique to match her voice's magic power. — Wayne Koestenbaum

Collectives can't make money from virtues they make money from weakness. Where there are no weak, they create weak. Cowards hate strong people. — Moxie Will

Now at this point you are probably thinking: so what? There is no Ebola in the world at the moment. Oh yes there is, but despite a twenty-year, multi-million-dollar hunt nobody has been able to find where it lives. Some say the host is a bat, others say it's a spider or a space alien. All we know is that occasionally, and for no obvious reason, someone comes out of the jungle with bleeding eyes and his stomach in a bag. — Jeremy Clarkson

Never be afraid to offer a smile; sure the risk is that a few foolish people may misinterpret your kindness as weakness, but the reward in their error be that at least they cannot blame you because you did show your teeth. — Johnnie Dent Jr.

Writers who get written about become self-conscious. They develop a regrettable habit of looking at themselves through the eyes of other people. They are no longer alone, they have an investment in critical praise, and they think they must protect it. This leads to a diffusion of effort. The writer watches himself as he works. He grows more subtle and he pays for it by loss of organic dash. — Raymond Chandler

I went through one period when I smoked a surprising, a really breath-taking, amount of grass almost every night. — David Letterman