From Island To Island Quotes & Sayings

Vast tracts of ocean, whether Polynesia, Micronesia or Melanesia, contain island populations that remain outside the modern world. They know about it, they may have traveled to it, they appreciate artifacts and medical help from it, but they live their daily lives much as hundreds of generations of ancestors before them, without money, electricity, phones, TV or manufactured food. — Andrew Rayner

Again the Prince found himself facing one of the enigmas of Sicily; in this secret island, where houses are barred and peasants refuse to admit they even know the way to their own village in clear view on a hillock within a few minutes' walk from here, in spite of the ostentatious show of mystery, reserve is a myth. — Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

You can't imagine fame. You can only ever see it from an outsider and comment on it with the rueful wisdom of a non participant. When it happens to you, it doesn't matter what age or how, it is a very steep learning curve. The imprtanot thing to realize in all of it is that life is short, to protect the ones you love, and not expose yourself to too much abuse or narcissistic reflection gazing and move on. If fame affords me the type of ability to do the kind of work I'm being offered, who am I to complain about the downsides. It's all relative. And this are obviously very high class problems. The way privacy becomes an every shrinking island is inevitable but also manageable and it doesn't necessary have to get that way ... — Benedict Cumberbatch

And you, Tacitus,
observe how I make my grove
on an old crannog
piled by the fearful dead:

a desolate peace.
Our mother ground
in sour with the blood
of her faithful,

they lie gargling
in her sacred heart
as the legions stare
from the ramparts.

Come back to this
'island of the ocean'
where nothing will suffice.
Read the inhumed faces

of casualty and victim;
report us fairly,
how we slaughter
for the common good

and shave the heads
of the notorious,
how the goddess swallows
our love and terror.
- Kinship — Seamus Heaney

So I had nothing to distract me from my books and their other worlds that swallowed me whole, from Narnia to the Wisconsin woods, from a small town in Sweden to the red earth of Prince Edward Island. Nothing and no one interested me as much as my books. — Luisa Weiss

Surprisingly, Manhattan casts a sort of undersized shadow onto Long Island. Where I grew up, everyone seemed totally disconnected from the city - ours could have been any suburb, anywhere - though when traffic was thin, it took us only half an hour to get into midtown. — Darin Strauss

I know it must have been hell for you, alone on that island for 5 years, but I'm...
-But what?
But was there ever a day when you were just... happy to be away from everything? No pressure from your family. No need to be the person everyone else expects you to be, was there ever a day when...
-When I didn't feel lost, I felt... free? More than one and uh... Those are the days that I miss.

-Huntress and Oliver, S1: E7, Arrow — Ga

My parents tried to shield me from how famous they were when I was growing up on Long Island. I had no idea. — Alexa Ray Joel

Disheartened, enraptured, and strangely lightheaded, Grady emerged from the trees and walked back through town to the island bridge, his ankles and hands marked up with thorn scratches. — Molly Ringle

French Polynesia embraces a vast ocean area strewn with faraway outer islands, each with a mystique of its own. The 118 islands and atolls are scattered over an expanse of water 18 times the size of California, though in dry land terms the territory is only slightly bigger than Rhode Island. The distance from one end of the island groups to another is four times further than from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Every oceanic island type is represented in these sprawling archipelagoes positioned midway between California and New Zealand. The coral atolls of the Tuamotus are so low they're threatened by rising sea levels, while volcanic Tahiti soars to 2,241 meters. Bora Bora and Maupiti, also high volcanic islands, rise from the lagoons of what would otherwise be atolls.
— David Stanley

When I was in art school, there was a stigma attached to coming from comfortable suburbia. If you were from Great Neck, Long Island, you couldn't be a 'real artist', so I found crafty ways of implying that I was from New York. — Laurie Simmons

from Canada, between 1840 and 1930 over 900,000 Quebecois traveled to the United States, and primarily to Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island. — Patrice DeMers Kaneda

[Anna] In February, I woke up from a nap. A bouquet of flowers gathered from the various bushes and shrubs scattered around the island lay on the blanket beside me, a small length of rope wound around their stems.
I found T.J. down at the shore. "Someone's been checking the calendar."
He grinned. "I didn't want to miss Valentine's Day."
I kissed him. "You're sweet to me."
Pulling me closer, he said, "It's not hard, Anna."
I stared into T.J.'s eyes, and he started to sway. My arms went around his neck and we danced, moving in a circle, the sand soft and warm under our feet.
"You don't need music, do you?"
"No," T.J. said. "But I do need you. — Tracey Garvis-Graves

I come from a very small island which is packed with people. I mean, jam-packed with people. I've lived a life which has been pretty much full up with ambition, ideas, stimulus, creativity, some negativity, which I try to avoid. Austin is a great sort of stepping-off point, if you like. I'm from a temperate climate. — Robert Plant

But it doesn't happen that way, I keep telling myself knowingly and sadly. Only in our fraternity pledges and masonic inductions, our cowboy movies and magazine stories, not in our real-life lives. For, the seventeenth-century humanist to the contrary, each man is an island complete unto himself, and as he sinks, the moving feet go on around him, from nowhere to nowhere and with no time to lose. The world is long past the Boy Scout stage of its development; now each man dies as he was meant to die, and as he was born, and as he lived: alone, all alone. Without any God, without any hope, without any record to show for his life.
("New York Blues") — Cornell Woolrich

Today I live on an island, in a house that is sad, hard, severe, that I built for myself, solitary on a sheer rock over the sea: a house that is the spectre, the secret image of prison. The image of my nostalgia. Maybe I never desired, not even then, to escape from jail. Man is not meant to live freely in freedom, but to be free inside a prison. — Curzio Malaparte

I have four Rhode Island Red hens. I get two eggs from them a day. They're feathered dustbins that eat leftover food and weeds, and they're easy to look after - I throw some grain at them in the morning, take the eggs and that's it. I love the sound of clucking. — Deborah Moggach

At low tide, much of the sea changes to land, and then more than seven hundred islands can be counted. People come here to hide, to find something they can't find on the mainland, to get religion through solitude. From June till September, nearly every day is perfect, with the 10,778-foot volcano of Mount Baker rising from the tumble of the Cascades to the west, blue herons and bald eagles crowding the skies, killer whales breaching offshore. The water is exceptionally clear, the result of a twice-daily shift-change in tide, when it sweeps north toward the Strait of Georgia, then back south toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca. In some places, the rip tides create white water like rapids on a foaming river. Being is bliss. But then the winters come and the tourists all go home and clouds hang on the horizon and unemployment doubles and the island dweller is left with whatever it is that led him to escape the rest of the world. — Timothy Egan

New York is an egotist. It will suffer no divided attention. "Look at me!" says the voice of the city imperiously, and its children obey. It snatches their thoughts from their inner griefs, and concentrates them on the pageant that rolls unceasingly from one end of the island to the other. One may despair in New York, but it is difficult to brood on the past; for New York is the City of the Present, the City of Things that are Going On. — P.G. Wodehouse

From reinforcing beaches in the Rockaways to installing generators at the Coney Island Houses and sealing holes in the subway system, New York is fortifying our ability to withstand future storm surges. — Frances Beinecke

An oceanic expanse of pre-dawn gray white below obscures a checkered grid of Saskatchewan, a snow plain nicked by the dark, unruly lines of woody swales. One might imagine that little is to be seen from a plane at night, but above the clouds the Milky Way is a dense, blazing arch. A full moon often lights the planet freshly, and patterns of human culture, artificially lit, are striking in ways not visible in daylight. One evening I saw the distinctive glows of cities around Delhi diffused like spiral galaxies in a continuous deck of stratus clouds far below us. In Algeria and on the Asian steppes, wind-whipped pennants of gas flared. The jungle burned in incandescent spots in Malaysia and Brazil. One clear evening at 20,000 feet over Manhattan, I could see, it seemed, every streetlight halfway to the end of Long Island. A summer lightning bolt unexpectedly revealed thousands of bright dots on the ink-black veld of the northern Transvaal: sheep. — Barry Lopez

Because the minister's wife refused to leave the minister, and because my mother required a worshipful companion, she was forced to break up with Fern and secure herself a new mate. As luck would have it, Dr. Finch had recently begun seeing a suicidal eighteen-year-old African-American girl who had taken a leave of absence from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her name was Dorothy. — Augusten Burroughs

The covers are rugged hand-laid paper of rice chaff, bamboo tailings, free-range hemp, and crystalline glacial meltwater made by wizened artisans operating out of a mist-shrouded temple hewn from living volcanic rock on some island known only to aerobically gifted, Spandex-sheathed Left Coast travel bores. An — Neal Stephenson

Just where was she trying to go back to? Prague? She had even forgotten it existed. To the small town in the west of Europe? No. She simply wanted to go away. Does that mean she wished to die? No, no, not at all. On the contrary, she had a terrific desire to live. Then she must have had some idea about the world she wanted to live in! She had none. All she had left was a tremendous craving for life, and her body. Nothing but these two things, nothing more. She wanted to tear them away from the island and save them. Her body and that craving for life. — Milan Kundera

He was hungry, and his first thought was to collect a dozen or two gulls' eggs to make a meal. But embryo chicks were forming in all of them. So he rowed out to do some fishing and was more succesful. He lived on fish from day to day and sang and whiled the time away and ruled over the island. When it rained he too shelter beneath a splendid overhangig rock. At night he slept on a patch of grass and the sun never set. — Knut Hamsun

There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good stories seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky. — Stephen King

I clung tightly to Kwan's mane as he propelled his great serpent body through the cloud banks. The cockatrice's big green head dipped under the clouds, and I spotted an emerald island below, with dramatic peaks jutting up from the jungle. I asked the great cockatrice for the name of the isle, but he only laughed at me, saying that names changed faster than a century's wind. That didn't seem very fast to me, but I took his word for it. — Heather Heffner

Amy Martin (ladysky) and Daniel Baciagalupo had a month to spend on Charlotte Turner's island in Georgian Bay; it was their wilderness way of getting to know each other before their life together in Toronto began. We don't always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly
as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth
the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives.
Little Joe was gone, but not a day passed in Daniel Baciagalupo's life when Joe wasn't loved or remembered. The cook had been murdered in his bed, but Dominic Baciagalupo had had the last laugh on the cowboy. Ketchum's left hand would lvie forever in Twisted River, and Six-Pack had known what to do with the rest of her old friend — John Irving

Back in the 1800's, Ormsby Island was one of South Carolina's crown jewels. The island was owned by Maxwell Ormsby, a very wealthy man who liked to entertain everyone from heads of state to artists and authors and anyone who knew how to make money in business. An invitation to the island was a declaration that you were someone on the move. Once a year, Ormsby opened the island up to the public and hosted a huge fair. It was the social event of the year in these parts. My family still talks about the days when my great grandmother would take the family out to enjoy the festivities. It must have been some party. — Hunter Shea

First, singles can't learn everything from singles. Duh. Nor can young adults learn everything from other young adults. To think that we're an island unto ourselves and can operate healthily under that construct is both arrogant and misguided. For one thing, we just don't know enough. We need older, seasoned believers to get up in our business and tell us what's what. We need to know where you've walked and what you've learned from the journey. — Lisa Anderson

Were you in the military?"
"Are you kidding me? I was in high school."
"High school," he said quietly. "You're American. And a civilian?"
"Uh, yes. An American civilian."
"Lovely. A straight answer. Keep it up. Did somebody train you?"
"No, nobody trained me. Unless you count the Rhode Island child welfare and juvenile justice systems. Why?"
Malachi held up his hand and ticked off the reasons with his fingers. "You stole a Guard's weapon. If I'm not mistaken, it belonged to a Gate Guard. Which means you managed to do it on your way into the city. You escaped Amid even after he had you in hand. You slashed his leg in just the right place, preventing him from chasing you. Under extreme duress, injured and cornered, you threw a knife and hit a target-"
"It's not like I hit something vital. — Sarah Fine

If there were not a bridge from Venice to Europe, Europe would be an island — John Berendt

There's hundreds of corners on this island, Crystal said. And there are thousands of us. Exiles from the heartland without a heart. Out of the old country, a brand-new tribe, dancing to new tunes around a bucket of fire in a vacant lot. — Tom Spanbauer

She could smell the sea in the air, but more than that, she could smell the scent of the grass as it awoke from its winter slumber. She could hear the sound of crickets as they sang to the emerging stars. It was springtime on the North Island. It was springtime for the world. — Diana Peterfreund

His mouth opens. From inside him comes a slow stream, without breath, without interruption. It flows up through his body and out upon me; it passes through the cabin, through the wreck; washing the cliffs and shores of the island, it runs northward and southward to the ends of the earth. Soft and cold, dark and unending, it beats against my eyelids, against the skin of my face. — J.M. Coetzee

In 1954 the gulag at Kengir witnessed an uprising by Christian and Muslim prisoners. The guards were driven out, and for forty days worship was freely practiced in the camp. Solzhenitsyn later documented the atmosphere of elation and idealism which prevailed in this doomed island of faith: the Muslims put on turbans and robes again, and 'the grey-black camp was a blaze of color'. The Chechens made kites from which they showered the neighboring villages with messages about the evils of the atheist system. Many marriages were celebrated. Survivors recall the forty days as a testimony to a possible way of living which had been suffocated by dreary unbelief. Delight in the present, and the knowledge of heaven outweighed the awareness of Khrushchev's inevitable revenge. The rebels were crushed under the attacks of tanks, but in the long term, this same spiritual outweighing insured the atheist dystopia's downfall. — Abdal Hakim Murad

Flowers heal me. Tulips make me happy. I keep myself surrounded by them as soon as they start coming to the island from Canada, and after that when they come from the fields in La Connor, not far from where I live. — Rebecca Wells

Far from being the rock or island in the Simon and Garfunkel song, it turns out that the best metaphor to describe the human body is 'sponge. — Rick Smith

From where I stood, the Statue of Liberty was a flourescent green fleck against the sky, and beyond her sat Ellis Island, the focus of so many myths; but it had been built too late for those early Africans - who weren't immigrants in any case - and it had been closed too soon to mean anything to the later Africans like Kenneth, or the cabdriver, or me. — Teju Cole

common table sugar, or sucrose, is a carbohydrate made up of two simple sugars, fructose and glucose. All plants produce sucrose, but a few contain very large quantities. Natives in the land now called New Guinea, the massive island north of Australia, discovered a tropical grass that came to be known as sugarcane, perhaps around 8000 BC. The sweet-tasting stalks were eventually carried to other lands, including India, where juices pressed from sugarcane were first boiled to produce crystals. Darius — Richard J. Johnson

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

Why do we live in this cycle of validation, swept up by the empty promises of the Love Idol, only to sink down when someone rejects us? We make frenetic jumps from island to island between tidal waves of insecurity. Beth Moore says culture has "thrown us under the bus. We have a fissure down the spine of our souls."[22] We want to keep up appearances. We want to avoid criticism. We treat our lives like a stat sheet, trying to keep score the world's way. — Jennifer Dukes Lee

From when she was a baby, Tom has taught the girl to respect, but not fear, the forces of nature- the lightning that might strike the light tower on Janus, the oceans that batter the island. — M.L. Stedman

The Good Quality Snob, or wearer of muted tweeds, cut almost exactly the same from year to year, often with a hat of the same material, [is] native to the Boston North Shore, the Chicago North Shore, the North Shore of Long Island, to Westchester County, the Philadelphia Main Line and the Peninsula area of San Francisco. — Russell Lynes

So what'd we miss?" Jade pulled a chair from the next table and wedged it between Kale and Dax.
"We were just about to vote you off the island," I said, stirring my coffee.
"You've got my vote," Kiernan said enthusiastically, glaring at Jade. — Jus Accardo

Young friends, whose string-and-tin-can phone extended from island to island, had to pay out more and more string, as if letting kites go higher and higher. They had more and more to tell each other, and less and less string. The boy asked the girl to say "I love you" into her can, giving her no further explanation. And she didn't ask for any, or say "That's silly," or "We're too young for love," or even suggest that she was saying "I love you" because he asked her to. Instead she said, "I love you." The words traveled through the long, long string. The boy covered his can with a lid, removed it from the string, and put her love for him on a shelf in his closet. Of course, he never could open the can, because then he would lose its contents. It was enough just to know it was there. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Depending on which frothy-mouthed Internet pulpit-beater I chose to believe, Holzter Point might conceal anything from alien artifacts to Bigfoot's sperm samples, plus a few pickled flipper babies from Three Mile Island and Jimmy Hoffa's stomach contents. I'd like to make fun of those guys, but I had information from a blind vampire that the storage facility held details of medical experiments conducted by the military on the unwilling undead. So far be it from me to call anyone nuts. — Cherie Priest

Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition - it's something to do with that experience of moving from West to East or East to West or from island to island. Even when you arrive, you're still going back and forth; your children are going round and round. There's no proper term for it - original sin seems too harsh; maybe original trauma would be better. — Zadie Smith

Early June, Providence, Rhode Island, the sun up for almost two hours already, lighting up the pale bay and the smokestacks of the Narragansett Electric factory, rising like the sun on the Brown University seal emblazoned on all the pennants and banners draped up over campus, a sun with a sagacious face, representing knowledge. But this sun
the one over Providence
was doing the metaphorical sun one better, because the founders of the university, in their Baptist pessimism, had chosen to depict the light of knowledge enshrouded by clouds, indicating that ignorance had not yet been dispelled from the human realm, whereas the actual sun was just now fighting its way through cloud cover, sending down splintered beams of light and giving hope to the squadrons of parents, who'd been soaked and frozen all weekend, that the unseasonable weather might not ruin the day's activities. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Somewhere in the city, an orange cat finished chewing on a marjoram plant next to his studio apartment's door and leapt purring onto the shoulder of his owner, home early from work. Somewhere in the city, a young Chinese pianist sat down at a rehearsal hall and let his fingers play the first opening notes of the Emperor Concerto, notes that would envelop the small girl in row D of the Philharmonic that night in a shimmering cloud. A boy in Staten Island touched his finger to the lower back of the girl who had been just a friend until then. A woman in Hell's Kitchen stood in her dark attic garret, her paintbrush in hand, and stepped back from the painting of chartreuse highway and forest-green sky that had taken her two years to complete. A clerk in a Brooklyn bodega tapped her crimson fingernail on a box of gripe water, reassuring the new mother holding a wailing baby, and the mother's grateful smile almost made both of them cry themselves. — Stephanie Clifford

Well, for starters, it's an island. Oahu and especially Honolulu were highly populated when the dead started coming back, and because it's an island, there would have been no escape from the creatures. It will be very risky to attempt resupply with that many of those things massed in the areas we'll be operating. — J.L. Bourne

Expanding the Toronto Island Airport will undermine the downtown's economy and liveability and intensify pollution and smog from Oshawa to Oakville. I urge Torontonians to close down this dangerous Trojan horse and get on with planning constructive and delightful ways of using our magnificent lakeside assets. — Jane Jacobs

I look around me, man . . . I'm trying to do what I've always done, to protect people, to keep them safe from the monsters - only I'm pretty sure I'm one of them. I can't figure out where I could have . . . what else I might have done . . ." I swallowed. "I'm lost. I know every step I took to get here, and I'm still lost." "Harry . . ." "And my friends," I said. "Even Thomas . . . I was stuck out on that island of the damned for a year. A year, Michael, and they only showed up a handful of times. Just Murphy and Thomas, maybe half a dozen times in more than a year. It's just a goddamned boat ride away, forty minutes. People drive farther than that to go to the movies. They know what I'm turning into. They don't want to watch it happening to me. — Jim Butcher

It is the curse of the genius that in the same measure in which others think him great and worthy of admiration, he thinks them small and miserable creatures. His whole life long he has to suppress this opinion; and, as a rule, they suppress theirs as well. Meanwhile, he is condemned to live in a bleak world, where he meets no equal, as it were an island where there are no inhabitants but monkeys and parrots. Moreover, he is always troubled by the illusion that from a distance a monkey looks like a man. — Arthur Schopenhauer

As you go down the water,' he said, 'you will find that the trees will fail, and you will come to a barren country. There the River flows in stony vales amid high moors, until at last after many leagues it comes to the tall island of the Tindrock, that we call Tol Brandir. There it casts its arms about the steep shores of the isle, and falls then with a great noise and smoke over the cataracts of Rauros down into the Nindalf, the Wetwang as it is called in your tongue. That is a wide region of sluggish fen where the stream becomes tortuous and much divided. There the Entwash flows in by many mouths from the Forest of Fangorn in the west. About that stream, on this side of the Great River, lies Rohan. On the further side are the bleak hills of the Emyn Muil. The wind blows from the East there, for they look out over the Dead Marshes and the Noman-lands to Cirith Gorgor and the black gates of Mordor. — J.R.R. Tolkien

Look around you
there are people around you. Maybe you will remember one of them all your life and later eat your heart out because you didn't make use of the opportunity to ask him questions. And the less you talk, the more you'll hear. Thin strands of human lives stretch from island to island of the Archipelago. They intertwine, touch one another for one night only in just such a clickety-clacking half-dark car as this and then separate once and for all. Put your ear to their quiet humming and the steady clickety-clack beneath the car. After all, it is the spinning wheel of life that is clicking and clacking away there. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Sometime during the many millions of years that have elapsed since mammalian faunas came into existence, some sort of island crossed from West Africa to South America. — Louis Leakey

Human existence is girt round with mystery: the narrow region of our experience is a small island in the midst of a boundless sea. To add to the mystery, the domain of our earthly existence is not only an island in infinite space, but also in infinite time. The past and the future are alike shrouded from us: we neither know the origin of anything which is, nor its final destination. — Jack McDevitt

Curran strode toward me, eyes blazing. "If I let her go, I'll need a replacement. Want to volunteer for the job."
He looked like he wouldn't be taking no for an anser. I swiped Slayer from its sheath and backed away from the edge of the roof. "And be girlfriend number twenty-three soon to be dumped in favor of girlfriend number twenty-four who has slightly bigger boobs? I don't think so."
He kept coming. "Oh Yeah?"
"Yeah, you get these beautiful women, make them dependent on you, and then you dump them. Well, this time a woman left you first, and your enormous ego can't deal with it. And to think that I hoped we could talk like reasonable adults. If we were the last two people on Earth, I'd find myself a moving island so I could get the hell away from you. — Ilona Andrews

I'm from a little island off of Massachusetts, Nantucket. It's hard getting into the music business from there, but my parents took me to songwriting festivals because I would write and produce my own music. — Meghan Trainor

But there were other great writers who had done all these things. What set Shakespeare apart ... even from other greats, was his generosity: his invitation, even insistence,for others to join him in the act of imagining ... His reticence [to add stage directions] made his works wonderfully elastic. It also made them demnding
sometimes maddeningly so
for directors and actors who had to figure out at every turn why these words and no others needed to be said right here and now. But Shakespeare was also demanding of his audiences: 'Yes,' you could almost hear him say, 'you are sitting in a fairly barren wooden theater. But dream yourselves to France. To a seacoast in Bohemia. To a magic-haunted island in a tempest-tossed sea. I dare you.' -Kate Stanley — Jennifer Lee Carrell

The Hell's Angels are very definitely a lower-class phenomenon, but their backgrounds are not necessarily poverty-stricken. Despite some grim moments, their parents seem to have had credit. Most of the outlaws are the sons of people who came to California either just before or during World War II. Many have lost contact with their families, and I have never met an Angel who claimed to have a hometown in any sense that people who use that term might understand it. Terry the Tramp, for instance, is "from" Detroit, Norfolk, Long Island, Los Angeles, Fresno and Sacramento. As a child, he lived all over the country, not in poverty but in total mobility. Like most of the others, he has no roots. He relates entirely to the present, the moment, the action. — Hunter S. Thompson

When a poet writes a poem, meaning arises - because the poet is not alone; he has created something. When a dancer dances, meaning arises. When a mother gives birth to a child, meaning arises. Left alone, cut off from everything else, isolated like an island, you are meaningless. Joined together you are meaningful. The bigger the whole, the bigger is the meaning. — Rajneesh

... "England [sic] is just a small island. Its roads and houses are small. With few exceptions, it doesn't make things that people in the rest of the world want to buy. And if it hadn't been separated from the continent by water, it almost certainly would have been lost to Hitler's ambitions."
~ nothing about its people and their steel will or courage, nothing about their history and legacy we share, nothing about the timbre of their values and virtues, just ".. — Mitt Romney

I made my drama teacher cry. I only took drama to get out of writing papers in English and the teacher was this thespian Broadway geek and here I was this Italian guy from Staten Island and I would put her in tears. — Vinny Guadagnino

I believe Andy was meant to die because he was too good I'm almost happy it ended the way it did because I've learned so many lessons from him. It would have been tragic if we got into fights and then divorced [If he had lived], I would be a fat housewife with three kids in Sands Point, Long Island. — Rachel Uchitel

After 1656 the Dutch, who had gained control over the Moluccas, chose the islands that could be most easily defended. They then burned all the nutmeg trees on the other islands to make sure no one else could profit from the trees. Anyone caught trying to smuggle nutmeg out of the Moluccas was put to death. The Dutch also dipped all their nutmegs in lime (a caustic substance) to stop the seed from sprouting and to prevent people from planting their own trees. Pigeons, however, defied these Dutch precautions. Birds could eat nutmeg fruits, fly to another island and leave the seeds behind in their droppings. — Meredith Sayles Hughes

The "herrenvolk" [master race] are all around you, threading their way on their bicycles between the piles of rubble or rushing off with jugs and buckets to meet the water cart. It is queer to think that these are the people who once ruled Europe, from the Channel to the Caspian Sea and might have conquered our own island, if they had known how weak we were. — George Orwell

Puberty for me was graduating from Thousand Island salad dressing to Caesar salads. It was like going from hot dogs and hamburgers to beef stroganoff, or from ice cream in a cone to creme brulee. — Richard Simmons

He hoped it would snow recklessly and bring to the island the impossible winter purity, so rare and precious, he remembered fondly from his youth. — David Guterson

I think we've met our quota for tearful reunions," she chuckled against the top of my head.
"When this is done, I promise I'm never going to leave the house ever again. We'll just stay in and order pizza and watch bad television."
Mom pulled away and looked over my shoulder. "Oh, I think you might want to get out every now and then," she said.
I felt the warm weight of Archer's hand on my waist. "Hey, I like pizza and bad TV."
I turned to him, surprised. "Your chest-"
"Cal," he said by way of explanation. "I owe that guy, like, a mountain of burgers. It's getting embarrassing."
Mom flashed me a little smile before saying, "You know, this isn't how I imagined meeting Sophie's first real boyfriend."
"Mom."
Archer gave me a little squeeze. "You mean I'm the first guy your parents have rescued from an enchanted island via use of a magic mirror? I feel so special. — Rachel Hawkins

He knows I have a soft spot for RLS and not just because he was sick or because we have the same initials but because there's something impossibly romantic about him and because before he started writing Treasure Island he first drew a map of an unknown island and because he believed in invisible places and was one of the last writers to know what the word adventure means. I could give you a hundred reasons why RLS is The Man. Look in his The Art of Writing (Book 683, Chatto & Windus, London) where he says that no living people have had the influence on him as strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. Or when he says his greatest friend is D'Artagnan from The Three Musketeers (Book 5, Regent Classics, London). RLS said: 'When I suffer in mind, stories are my refuge, I take them like opium.' And when you read Treasure Island you feel you are casting off. That's the thing. You are casting off and leaving behind the ordinary dullness of the world. — Niall Williams

Sooner or later, we all go through a crucible. I'm guessing your's was that island. Most believe there are two types of people who go into a crucible: the ones who grow stronger from the experience and survive it, and the ones who die. But there's a third type: the ones who learn to love the fire. They chose to stay in their crucible because it's easier to embrace the pain when it's all you know anymore, — Marc Guggenheim

By the Angel," Jace said, looking the demon up and down. "I knew Greater Demons were meant to be ugly, but no one ever warned me about the smell."
Abbadon opened its mouth and hissed. Inside its mouth were two rows of jagged glass-sharp teeth.
"I'm not sure about this wind and howling darkness business," Jace went on, "smells more like landfill to me. You sure you're not from Staten Island? — Cassandra Clare

Because of Columbus's exaggerated report and promises, his second expedition was given seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred men. The aim was clear: slaves and gold. They went from island to island in the Caribbean, taking Indians as captives. But as word spread of the Europeans' intent they found more and more empty villages. On Haiti, they found that the sailors left behind at Fort Navidad had been killed in a battle with the Indians, after they had roamed the island in gangs looking for gold, taking women and children as slaves for sex and labor. — Howard Zinn

The three most celebrated doctors on the island have been to see me. One sniffed at what I spat, the second tapped where I spat from, and the third sounded me and listened as I spat. The first said I was dead, the second that I was dying and the third that I'm going to die. — Frederic Chopin

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

No man is an island, as they say. No. I've tried it. I've gone on retreats at various times in my life for three or four or five days. I was desperate to get out of there and talk to somebody. But I fly fish a lot, and I can only do that really by myself. I find I'm never lonesome when I'm on a river, far from it, but it's a lonely practice. — Liam Neeson

Look, this island is an attempt to re-create a natural environment from the past. To make an isolated world where extinct creatures roam freely. Correct?" "Yes." "But from my point of view, such an undertaking is impossible. The mathematics are so self-evident that they don't need to be calculated. It's rather like my asking you whether, on a billion dollars in income, you had to pay tax. You wouldn't need to pull out your calculator to check. You'd know tax was owed. And, similarly, I know overwhelmingly that one cannot successfully duplicate nature in this way, or hope to isolate it. — Michael Crichton

On island after island, Europeans and their pathogens killed the natives, slave ships appeared on the horizon, and cane sprouted in the fields. Streams of survivors crawled forth from slave ships to replenish the cane-field work gangs of men and women as they died. But enslavers grew fabulously rich. — Edward E. Baptist

In the interval from about February to May 1609, there was considerable material progress in and about Jamestown. Perhaps forty acres were cleared and prepared for planting in Indian corn, the new grain that fast became a staple commodity. A "deep well" was dug in the fort. The church was re-covered and twenty cabins built. A second trial was made at glass manufacture in the furnaces built late in 1608. A blockhouse was built at the isthmus which connected the Island to the mainland for better control of the Indians, and a new fort was erected on a tidal creek across the river from Jamestown. — Charles E. Hatch

I am very attracted by the mysterious landscape of Easter Island. Not only because it is a piece of land that is further away from another, but also because of the beautiful statues of Moai that are there. To do a beautiful walk there, I would have to involve the Moai, and the Rapa Nui people who live on the island. — Philippe Petit

I know this sounds like quite a pile. I know, too, that some of you will wonder why I don't just buy a Kindle. I see your point, but the trouble is that to do so would be to forgo the pleasure of the moment when, years in the future, sand falls from the pages of an old book, and you suddenly remember the Isle of Wight and A Passage to India, a Greek island and The Map of Love, or whatever. For me, a ghostly trace of Ambre Solaire rising from the pages of a sun-bleached paperback is a way back to the past: to favourite stories as much as to favourite beaches. — Rachel Cooke

Now the twelfth canto of Book II is an almost literal translation from Tasso description in the Jerusalem Delivered of the island of Armida. That poem was not printed till 1582. It is likely enough that Spenser may have seen part of it in manuscript, which would account for the general resemblance of the Adonis passages, though the likeness is not close enough to make any debt certain. — Janet Spens

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

After that, Simon swam naked every night. By the third skinnydipping
session, I secretly peeled off my bikini top while I was in
the water. It was safe. Simon was splashing somewhere ahead of
me. He couldn't see. It was an amazing feeling. I felt free. Or at least half of me did.
And right then that seemed to "t with the person I felt I was on
Long Island: half-cautious, half-spontaneous, surprising myself
with my random behavior, my sudden moves away from who I
thought I was.
"So how was it, your half skinny dip?" Simon asked as I was
drying off.
"You were watching me?" I blushed, horrified.
"Just a hunch," he replied. "Feels good though, right?"
I hit him with the towel. — Amanda Howells

I never know what you're thinking. Sometimes you're so closed off ... like an island slate. You intimidate me. That's why I keep quiet. I don't know which way your mood is going to go. It swings from north to south and back again in a nanosecond. — E.L. James

At first, you fall in love. You wake in the morning woozy and your twilight is lit with astral violet light. You spelunk down into each other until you come to possess some inner vision of each other that becomes one thing. Us. Together. And time passes. Like the forming of Earth itself, volcanoes rise and spew lava. Oceans appear. Rock plates shift. Sea turtles swim half the ocean to lay eggs on the mother island; songbirds migrate over continents for berries from a tree. You evolve
cosmically and geologically. You lose each other and find each other again. Every day. Until love gathers the turtles and the birds of your world and encompasses them, too. — Michael Paterniti

The Jeep was parked at the beginning of the causeway when Denny got off the bus. She ignored it and started toward the island.
"Denise . . ."
Denny ignored Mr. Jones's call and kept on walking.
She heard the engine start, and soon the Jeep was rolling along beside her.
"Picked up your mail," said Mr. Jones. He handed some envelopes out the window. Denny grabbed them without a word.
"There's a letter there from some old coot named Jones," Mr. Jones said. "Looks like an apology."
Denny looked down and ruffled through the envelopes. "There is not," she said.
"No?" said Mr. Jones sheepishly. "Well, there should be. Guess he didn't get around to writing it. He feels real bad though. I know that for a fact."
Denny stopped and put her hand on her hip and stared at Mr. Jones. — Jackie French Koller

Living like this means you don't have a container anymore for the different days, can't hold in a little twenty-four-hour-sized box set of events that constitute a unit, something you can compartmentalize, something with a beginning and an end, something to fill with a to-do list. Living like this means that it all runs together, a cold and bright December morning with your father or a lazy evening in late August, one of those sunsets that seem to take longer than is possible, where the sun just refuses to go down, where the hour seems to elongate to the point that it doesn't seem like it can stretch any farther without detaching completely from the hour before it, like a piece of taffy, like under sea molten lava forming a new island, a piece of time detaching from the seafloor and floating up to the surface. — Charles Yu

I'm a small-town boy who comes from a traditional family on a tiny island called Belitung. I may not know where I'm going, but I'll always know where to come home to. — Andrea Hirata

In decades past, the three clans of the island - tree witches, gargoyles, and wolves, had cloaked their land with many layers of protection. Their combined magic had created such a powerful force it had remained undetected by human technology. When a feud erupted between the witches and gargoyles twenty-five years ago it led to a division of land. Without reinforcements from the clans' combined magic, the protection seeped away. — Lisa Carlisle

It was an enchanted place, he said, designed to keep kids safe from the monsters, on an island where the sun shined every day and nobody ever got sick or died. — Ransom Riggs

Brooke, I'm already gone. The only reason I tried to get away from you boneheads earlier was because I wanted a couple of hours to see the sights before I headed home. Crooked Street maybe. Or Treasure Island. That sweet little bridge you're all so fond of. I can't say I like the Alcatraz tour, though. It's a little too realistic. — Kim Harrison

When he mentioned family, I could only think of my father, my real father, the Long Island janitor with the impenetrable accent and true-to-life smells. My mind returned away from what Joshie was saying and I pondered my father's humiliation. The humiliation of growing up a Jew in the Soviet Union, of cleaning piss-stained bathrooms in the States, of worshipping a country that would collapse as simply and inelegantly as the one he had abandoned. — Gary Shteyngart

I was always around people who were in the business from the time I was an absolute baby. I grew up in New York City, and my parents, my sister, and I had a house on Fire Island, and they were part of a set of people that were all close and friendly, most of whom were involved in show business in one regard or another. So it was always familiar to me, and I kind of enjoyed it. — Fred Melamed

Being with him made her feel as though her soul had escaped from the narrow confines of her island country into the vast, extravagant spaces of his. He made her feel as though the world belonged to them- as though it lay before them like an opened frog on a dissecting table, begging to be examined. — Arundhati Roy

The way with Ireland is that no sooner do you get away from her than the golden mists begin to close about her, and she lies, an Island of the Blest, something enchanted in our dreams. When you come back you may think you are disillusioned, but you know well that the fairy mists will begin to gather about her once more. — Katharine Tynan

On the plane leaving Tokyo I'm sitting alone in back twisting the knobs on Etch-A-Sketch and Roger is next to me singing "Over the Rainbow" straight into my ear, things changing, falling apart, fading, another year, a few more moves, a hard person who doesn't give a fuck, a boredom so monumental it humbles, arrangements so fleeting made by people you don't even know that it requires you to lose any sense of reality you might have once acquired, expectations so unreasonable you become superstitious about ever matching them. Roger offers me a joint and I take a drag and stare out the window and I relax for a moment when the lights of Tokyo, which I never realized is an island, vanish from view but this feeling only lasts a moment because Roger is telling me that other lights in other cities, in other countries, on other planets, are coming into view soon. — Bret Easton Ellis

When I was 16, I felt very relieved to discover cinema. It was like an island where I could see life and death from another perspective. Every young person should be interested in that island. It's a beautiful place. — Leos Carax