Desert Island Quotes & Sayings

I have to say, if someone literally said to me, 'You're going off to a desert island, what is the one thing you would bring?' I would say, 'It's my concealer or you can just kill me now.' I've thought this through! Because I would find, like, berries in a bowl and make blush. — Drew Barrymore

Bod said, 'I want to see life. I want to hold it in my hands. I want to leave a footprint on the sand of a desert island. I want to play football with people. I want,' he said, and then he paused and he thought. 'I want everything. — Neil Gaiman

At school some learning by heart was compulsory, though not irksome. But this intake was out-distanced many times, as it always is among people who need poetry, by a private anthology, both of those automatically absorbed and of poems consciously chosen and memorized as though one were stocking up for a desert island or for a stretch of solitary. — Patrick Leigh Fermor

Lettering is a precise art and strictly subject to tradition. The 'New Art ' notion that you can make letters whatever shapes you like,is as foolish as the notion, if anyone has such a notion, that you can make houses any shapes you like. You can't, unless you live all by yourself on a desert island. — Stanley Morison

I guess if there was a desert island scenario and I only could take one font with me, I guess it would be Helvetica, though it has it's limitations, I think it's incredibly versatile and gets the job done and I also think it's one of the typefaces that will really survive the test of time beyond the next several decades if not into the next century. — Khoi Vinh

That night, she told me the old story again about the woman who had been left behind on a desert island by the man she loved. She waited for him to return for many years, surviving on seaweed and sand, until at last she grew so small she could fit herself inside a bottle and roll into the sea. Who found the bottle, I wondered, but my mother said no one knew what happened to it or where the woman had wanted to go. A fish could have swallowed the bottle, she said, or it could have been dashed against rocks. Other possibilities: sharks, mermaids, lonely sailors at sea. — Jenny Offill

I felt alone out there, like I was on a desert island. I felt like Gilligan. — Mickey Rivers

[Madame Nhu was] the Sandra Dee of South Vietnam. If I were cast on a desert island with her, I would quickly make friends with the natives. — Oscar Levant

Poverty is such a relative thing; but no man is really poor till life becomes a desert island that gives him neither food nor shelter nor hope. — Jennifer Worth

Tell me you spotted a condom tree over to the right by the stream of lube. — Jane Davitt

As much as I am a huge soccer fan, music just kills it when it comes to importance. I could go to a desert island without a football and survive happily, but if I had to go without music, I think I'd end up killing myself. It fuels my soul. It always has. — Joe Elliott

The poet who writes "free" verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor. — W. H. Auden

True friendshipmultiplies the good in life and divides its evils. strive to have friends, for life without friends is like life on a desert island ... to find one real friend in a lifetime is a good fortune;to keep him is a blessing — Baltasar Gracian

All justice is inherently social. Can someone on a desert island be either just or unjust? — Thomas Sowell

She had a vision of the two of them trapped on a tiny raft surrounded by miles of open water. It would be a kind of test, like surviving on a desert island
but that's what a marriage was, wasn't it? They would have to help each other or die. — Stewart O'Nan

She has even secret mischievous moments in which she wishes she could get him alone, on a desert island, away from all ties and with nobody else in the world to consider, and just drag him off his pedestal and see him making love like any common man. — George Bernard Shaw

I love my garlic press; in fact, it is probably my one true desert island gadget. But I'm happy to put it aside whenever the smell and sweet taste of slow-cooked garlic is called for. — Yotam Ottolenghi

For children who depend on mentally escaping into their minds to survive, imagination can become both refuge and desert island. — Na'ama Yehuda

If I were ever stranded on a desert island, there would be 3 things I'd need: food, shelter, and a grip. — George C. Scott

Taking the 'desert island challenge' which leads Christians to submit their family life to Sola Scriptura inevitably leads them to desire to submit their corporate worship to Sola Scriptura.
(Excerpt from the forward of "How God Wants Us to Worship Him" by Joseph C. Morecraft) — Douglas W. Phillips

Khaled, my first teacher, was the kind of man who carried his past in the temple fires of his eyes, and fed the flames with pieces of his broken heart. I've known men like Khaled in prisons, on battlefields, and in the dens where smugglers, mercenaries, and other exiles meet. They all have certain characteristics in common. They're tough, because there's a kind of toughness that's found in the worst sorrow. They're honest, because the truth of what happened to them won't let them lie. They're angry, because they can't forget the past or forgive it. And they're lonely. Most of us pretend, with greater or lesser success, that the minute we live in is something we can share. But the past for every one of us is a desert island; and those like Khaled, who find themselves marooned there, are always alone. — Gregory David Roberts

Pamalican Island is a wonderful story told with the sparkle of fun and a true understanding of the magic of childhood. A magical journey for any child who dreams of desert islands. — Raffaella Barker

Have I gotten everything right? I doubt it. Not even the great Daniel Defoe did that; in Robinson Crusoe, our hero strips naked, swims out to the ship he has recently escaped....and then fills up his pockets with items he will need to stay alive on his desert island. — Stephen King

It was ironic, but when you scratched the surface, most successful men were working for one thing only
to retire
and the sooner the better. Whereas women were the complete opposite. She had never heard a woman say she was working so she could retire to a desert island or to live on a boat. It was probably, she thought, because most women didn't think they deserved to do nothing. — Candace Bushnell

If I were planning to be stranded on a desert island, I wouldn't take Freud's books with me, because I've already read them all. — Anne Roiphe

I want to see life. I want to hold it in my hands. I want to leave a footprint on the sand of a desert island. I want to play football with people. I want," he said, and then he paused and thought. "I want everything. — Neil Gaiman

What luxury would I take to a desert island? A mirror. It's true. I'd miss me. — Simon Cowell

Donald Westlake's Parker novels are among the small number of books I read over and over. Forget all that crap you've been telling yourself about War and Peace and Proust-these are the books you'll want on that desert island. — Lawrence Block

A movie I must have seen 10 times is 'Jonathan Livingston Seagull.' It's an old movie, but still such a beautiful message. If I had only one film I could take on my computer on a desert island, I would take 'Jonathan Livingston Seagull.' — Bertrand Piccard

Some gangs of friends formed subgroups of five, mirroring us, where each friend could have a favorite Duran without stepping on the toes or desires of the other four friends, because if you were an Andy fan, clearly you could not be friends with another Andy fan. That would not work. You could be friends with a Nick fan, however, because there was no conflict of interest. Both friends could live together in harmony with Nick and Andy on that designated fantasy desert island for ever and ever, without a hint of envy. — Nigel John Taylor

If you were to be stranded on a desert island, what three items would you take? I gave this frivolous answer: A cat, a hat and a piece of string. — Joanne Harris

Dr. Warren was of the mental build of the man whose life would be interesting and full of outlook if it were spent on a desert island or in the Bastille. — Frances Hodgson Burnett

I want us all to face our fears and stop behaving like our goal in life is to merely survive. "Surviving" is for wimps and game show contestants stranded in the jungle or on a desert island. You are not stranded. You own the store ... You deserve better. — Michael Moore

His friend had the capacity to refer to anything from majestic ghost gum forest in the Snowy Mountains to the sticky, dense rainforest of North Queensland as 'Bush'. If it wasn't a desert, a town or a city, then to Gary it was 'the Bush'. — GP Field

If you choose not to live self-responsibly, you count on others to make up your default. No one abjures self-responsibility on a desert island. — Nathaniel Branden

An armchair is always an armchair, to the modern child, never a ship, never a desert island. The pattern on the wall are patterns; not characters whose faces change at dusk ... The trouble is, the children have no imagination. They are sweet, and have carefree, honest eyes; but they have not any magic in their day. The magic has all gone ... — Daphne Du Maurier

He washed up on a desert island, where he incurred the most remarkable series of mishaps that somehow kept turning out for the best. He had no time to keep a journal. He was never rescued. — David Bromige

For a desert island, one would choose a good dictionary rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in relation to its readers, a dictionary is absolutely passive and may legitimately be read in an infinite number of ways. — W. H. Auden

She has mischievious moments when she wishes she could get him alone on a desert island ... — George Bernard Shaw

I would love to go to Iran. The island of Madagascar, everyone says is pretty exotic, or the wonderful Namibian desert. — Michael Palin

Lucinda," she finally returned most cordially, "if I were to be marooned on a desert island for the remainder of my days and must needs choose between your company and that of an organ-grinder's flea-bitten monkey, I should not hesitate a moment before opting for the latter. — Kasey Michaels

For me, a desert island is no tragedy, neither is a deserted planet. — Peter Wessel Zapffe

Fending for oneself alone on a desert island is really no laughing matter. It is no crying one either — Virginia Woolf

The girl who'd taken on a Pirate Lord and his entire island, the girl who'd stolen Asterion horses and raced along the beach in the Red Desert, the girl who'd sat on her own rooftop, watching the sun rise over Avery, the girl who'd felt alive with possibility ... that girl was gone. — Sarah J. Maas

Not to leave planet Earth would be like castaways on a desert island not trying to escape ... Sending humans to other planets ... will shape the future of the human race in ways we don't yet understand, and may determine whether we have any future at all. — Stephen Hawking

Sometimes, from beyond the skycrapers, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island. — Albert Camus

Children ask me sometimes what book I'd take to a desert island, but I think I couldn't go to a desert island unless it had a library. — Mary Stolz

A romance is never just a romance, there's adventure, mystery and movement.

You need a grand, dramatic setting - the Swiss Alps were always an personal favourite of mine - and a chance meeting, on a train, a cruise, or perhaps the hero and heroine find themselves shipwrecked on a desert island.

The men are normally rich, well-to-do - but never vulgar with their money. Young men lack the maturity to take control so an older man is essential to provide the reassurance the heroine's needs.

There's always a fair amount of turbulence before he sweeps in to save the day. A happy ending is an absolute must. — Ida Pollock

What a splendid king you'd make of a desert island - you and you alone. — Sophocles

If you want to earn the gratitude of your own age you must keep in step with it. But if you do that you will produce nothing great. If you have something great in view you must address yourself to posterity: only then, to be sure, you will probably remain unknown to your contemporaries; you will be like a man compelled to spend his life on a desert island and there toiling to erect a memorial so that future seafarers shall know he once existed. — Arthur Schopenhauer

I can't remember exactly the first thing I wrote, but one of the stories, was about a pilot whose plane crashed on a desert island, and the only other life on the island was a brown cow with yellow spots. The cow had ... to survive, had taught itself to eat and get nutriments from sand. I guess, I've always been interested in adaptability and taking whatever life hands you and running with it. — Tom Robbins

Living in a society, instead of on a desert island, does not relieve a man of the responsibility of supporting his own life. — Ayn Rand

One of the world's most tiresome questions is what object one would bring to a desert island,because people always answer "a deck of cards" or "Anna Karenina" when the obvious answer is "a well equipped boat and a crew to sail me off the island and back home where I can play all the card games and read all the Russian novels I want. — Lemony Snicket

Madeira is a wine like no other. It is fine wine in extremis. Heat and air, both the sworn enemies of most wines and wine makers, conspire to turn madeira into one of the most enthralling of the world's wines as well as the most resilient. Wines from the nineteenth and even the eighteenth centuries still retain an ethereal, youthful gloss, even after spending what is, in wine terms, an aeon in cask and bottle. Having gone through this extreme and often extensive ageing process, madeira is virtually indestructible. Once the cork is removed, the wine comes to no harm, even if the bottle is left on ullage for months, even for years on end. If ever there was a wine to take away with you to a desert island, this is it. — Richard Mayson

Zuleika, on a desert island, would have spent most of her time in looking for a man's footprint. — Max Beerbohm

We are social beings and confidence is framed by our interactions in the social world. It's rather difficult to be confident or shy on a desert island with no one to share your coconuts! — Gary Wood

Rick Owens is my desert island designer. I could live in his clothes alone, and I collect Ossie Clark. — Mia Sara

Not that I was incapable of friendship. 'Don't be shy', the teachers coaxed. I was not shy, only extremely choosy. And Denise shone like a diamond. If you had to ask me to define paradise, I would have said a desert island which Denise could visit, on a boat. — Anneli Rufus

NOTICE
Persons attempting to find a "text" in this book will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a "subtext" in this book will be banished; persons attempting to explain, interpret, explicate, analyze, deconstruct, or otherwise "understand" it will be exiled to a desert island in the company only of other explainers.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR — Wendell Berry

Personality is a person among persons. There is no personality of one man on a desert island. — Kwame Kilpatrick

Three people marooned on a desert island would soon reinvent politics. — Mason Cooley

Put any two people together and each will seek ways of feeling superior to the other. If a ship went down in the Pacific and a single sailor managed to swim to a desert island, would he be pleased to see, ten minutes later, another sailor emerging from the surf? Quite possibly - but only if the new arrival accepted that the first man was now a landed aristocrat while he himself was an illegal immigrant. — Michael Foley

A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being. — Daniel Dennett

Corinne Bailey Rae I listen to a lot, and I'll hear Desert Island Discs and quickly write down the name of a song, and it will open up a new area of music for me. I discovered an Argentinian guitarist, Jose Luis Bieito, on Classic FM. — Lesley Manville

You can see when an actor gets bored: Their eyes go dead. I promised myself I'd never let that happen. If it does, I'll go and live on a desert island for a year. — Anna Friel

I think that if I were required to spend the rest of my life on a desert island, and to listen to or play the music of any one composer during all that time, that composer would almost certainly be Bach. — Glenn Gould

Come away with me, he said, we will live on a desert island. I said, I am a desert island. It was not what he had in mind. — Margaret Atwood

You can't totally rebel, otherwise you have to go live on your own, on a desert island. It's as simple as that. — Patrick McGoohan

Here, beside this great black surface that is my desk, I feel as though I am on a desert island. — Etty Hillesum

A bird, music and food -desert island items — Michael Johnson

A man abandoned by himself on a desert island would adorn neither his hut nor his person; nor would he seek for flowers, still less would he plant them, in order to adorn himself therewith. It is only in society that it occurs to him to be not merely a man, but a refined man after his kind (the beginning of civilization). For such do we judge him to be who is both inclined and apt to communicate his pleasure to others, and who is not contented with an object if he cannot feel satisfaction in it in common with others. Again, every one expects and requires from every one else this reference to universal communication of pleasure, as it were from an original compact dictated by humanity itself. — Immanuel Kant

Victoria was just as much in love with me as I was with her. We could not bear to be apart for a single second. We were like two lovers shipwrecked on a desert island. There was no world outside our love. — Andy Gibb

When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness, and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, or what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost, with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair. — Blaise Pascal

So I make one phone call, and just like that, we're eating pizza at 6:30. What is this world? You tap seven abstract figures onto a piece of plastic thin as a billfold, hold that plastic device to your head, use your lungs and vocal cords to indicate more abstractions, and in thirty minutes, a guy pulls up in a 2,000-pound machine made on an island on the other side of the world, fueled by viscous liquid made from the rotting corpses of dead organisms pulled from the desert on yet another side of the world and you give this man a few sheets of green paper representing the abstract wealth of your home nation, and he gives you a perfectly reasonable facsimile of one of the staples of the diet of a people from yet another faraway nation.
And the mushrooms are fresh. — Jess Walter

For the great eras in the history of the development of all the arts have been eras not of increased feeling or enthusiasm in feeling for art, but of new technical improvements primarily and specially. The discovery of marble quarries in the purple ravines of Pentelicus and on the little low-lying hills of the island of Paros gave to the Greeks the opportunity for that intensified vitality of action, that more sensuous and simple humanism, to which the Egyptian sculptor working laboriously in the hard porphyry and rose-coloured granite of the desert could not attain. The splendour of the Venetian school began with the introduction of the new oil medium for painting. The progress in modern music has been due to the invention of new instruments entirely, and in no way to an increased consciousness on the part of the musician of any wider social aim. — Oscar Wilde

The wizards were civilized men of considerable education and culture. When faced with being inadvertently marooned on a desert island they understood immediately that the first thing to do was place the blame — Terry Pratchett

I've been asked over the years to compile a list of desert-island discs. I couldn't do that. If I was trapped on a desert island, I don't think I'd want 10 songs to bring with me. — John Lydon

Who would wave a flag to be rescued if they had a desert island of their own? That was the thing that spoilt Robinson Crusoe. In the end he came home. There never ought to be an end. — Arthur Ransome

Someone asked me, if I were stranded on a desert island what book would I bring ... 'How to Build a Boat.' — Steven Wright

A sailor was stranded on a desert island and managed to survive by making friends with the local natives - such good friends, in fact, that one day the chief offered him his daughter for an evening's entertainment. Late that night, while they made love, the chief's daughter kept shouting, "Oga, boga! Oga, boga!" The arrogant sailor assumed this must be how the natives express their appreciation when something is fantastic. A few days later the chief invites the sailor for a game of golf. On his first stroke, the chief hit a hole in one. Eager to try out his new vocabulary, the sailor enthusiastically shouted "Oga boga! Oga boga!" The chief turned around with a puzzled look on his face and asked, "What you mean, 'wrong hole'? — Osho

And Josh wanted to tell her what he knew: that love might look like a shore but turn out to be a desert island, where you roamed alone, talking to yourself, trying to crack open coconuts with your shoe. So thirsty you drank the salt water. So hungry you ate the sand. — Leah Stewart

We're all trapped. It's always 1734. All of us, we're stuck in the same time capsule, the same as those television shows where the same people are marooned on the same desert island for thirty seasons and never age or escape. They just wear more makeup. In a creepy way, those shows are maybe too authentic. — Chuck Palahniuk

It is not physical solitude that actually separates one from others; not physical isolation, but spiritual isolation. It is not the desert island nor the stony wilderness that cuts you from the people you love. It is the wilderness in the mind, the desert wastes in the heart through which one wanders lost and a stranger. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

This was my first real lesson in politics ... If you are cast on a desert island with only a screwdriver, hatchet, and the chisel to make a boat with, why, go and make the best one you can. It would be better if you had a saw, but you haven't, so with men. — Theodore Roosevelt

You put a guy on a desert island, he'll do it to mud, a chicken, a barrel, anything, a knothole. — Lenny Bruce

If you are in a remote desert island, let your best hope be your own efforts to build a ship instead of waiting for a ship to appear among the fogs! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Most of us pretend, with greater or lesser success, that the minute we live in is something we can share. But the past for every one of us is a desert island. — Gregory David Roberts

You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary - it's always imaginary - world in which I would like to live.
(Interview, The Paris Review) — William S. Burroughs

His heart is a desert island ... The whole scope, the whole energy of his mind surround and protect him; his depths isolate him and guard him against the truth. He flatters himself that he is entirely alone there ... Patience, dear lady. Perhaps, one day, he will discover some footprint on the sand ... What holy and happy terror, what salutary fright, once he recognizes in that pure sign of grace that his island is mysteriously inhabited! ... — Paul Valery

Imagine fifty thousand men trapped on a desert island, deprived of food and water and sex but somehow kept alive for fifty thousand years. Then, after they've been tormented a hundred steps beyond insanity, tortured past self-mutilation and cannibalism, somebody drops off a sculpture of a naked woman made from T-bone steaks. If you could then capture the sound of them simultaneously fucking and eating and tearing her to shreds and broadcast it into the center of your skull at ten thousand watts, it would still sound absolutely nothing like what I heard. — David Wong