Insular Quotes & Sayings

You can get insular with fashion. — Alexander McQueen

Japan is a startling clash of the deeply traditional and the spiritual. The intensely current and the superficial. It's ancient, but futuristic. Conservative, yet hedonistic. Sleek skyscrapers graze the clouds like trees seeking sun in a man-made rainforest. Their concrete foundations often fertilized by the bodies of locals run afoul of the yakuza. It's a homogenous island nation with a quaint surface and a Twin Peaks underbelly. The polite, insular, and eerily innocuous, living symbiotically with the perverse, extroverted, and bizarre. Fashion-forward and fashion-retarded. You could make similar generalizations about most cultures of course, but Japan's beautiful contrasts were better than most."--Parker Choi — Robet Jung

Relying on hard data, committing to open and democratic communication, acknowledging fallibility: these are the central tenets of any system that aims to protect us from error. They are also markedly different from how we normally think - from our often hasty and asymmetric treatment of evidence, from the cloistering effects of insular communities, and from our instinctive recourse to defensiveness and denial. — Kathryn Schulz

I'm really honored that Bon Iver gives me a platform to do whatever I want, but there's only so much time you can spend digging through yourself before you become insular. I'm not in a hurry to go back to that temperature. — Justin Vernon

Real cultural diversity results from the interchange of ideas, products, and influences, not from the insular development of a single national style. — Tyler Cowen

I think actors are at the mercy of the opportunities presented to them. So you kind of have to wait for them to choose you. My music is insular - I can choose that. — Dwight Yoakam

But the poetry of that kiss, the wonder of it, the magic that there was in life for hours after it--who can describe that? It is so easy for an Englishman to sneer at these chance collisions of human beings. To the insular cynic and the insular moralist they offer an equal opportunity. It is so easy to talk of "passing emotion," and how to forget how vivid the emotion was ere it passed. Our impulse to sneer, to forget, is at root a good one. We recognize that emotion is not enough, and that men and women are personalities capable of sustained relations, not mere opportunities for an electrical discharge. Yet we rate the impulse too highly. We do not admit that by collisions of this trivial sort the doors of heaven may be shaken open. — E. M. Forster

By 1957, a mere eleven years after its devastation, Japan not only had the most modern steel mills in the world but was the foremost steel producer in the world. But that was just the beginning: In the decade following 1957, Japanese steel production grew by 170 percent - while the American steel industry grew only 20 percent. The American steel industry, believing itself invulnerable, was headed by a complacent and insular management which was slow to bring in modern technology and which, even as the challenger grew more proficient, locked the industry into ever costlier labor agreements. By 1964, 28 percent of Japan's steel exports was going to America. In Japan, a thrust in shipbuilding followed closely upon the success in steel; by 1956 Japan had replaced Britain as the world's leading shipbuilding nation. — David Halberstam

[About Poirot] The flamboyant moustaches, the sartorial elegance, the white spats and the pointed patent leather shoes all filled this insular young man with distinct misgivings. — Agatha Christie

They were philanthropists, helping out with charitable and cultural causes, but when it came to anything progressive like a new belt-line around Buffalo, or moving toll-barriers, or raising taxes to support a crumbling school system, they drew the lines around what could be done, not what should be done, to protect their insular world of being the best kept secret in the northeast as far as cost of living went. — Patricia Butler

When you live in America, it's kind of insular - the news coverage that you get - unless you're really smart about it and find more international news coverage. I've learned that from my husband. In the French culture, they talk politics. — Kim Raver

Had she insight, could she have pierced the barriers of her highly selective, insular world, she may have discovered that all her life she had been with a visual defect which had gone unnoticed and neglected by herself and by those closest to her: she was born color blind. — Harper Lee

I wasn't quick-witted or confident enough to play them at their cruel games. I'd feel the heat rush to my face as I flumbed for a rebuff, and I'd become highly aware of my heavy bottom lip, the position of my hands, of my entire body, and I'd end up looking silly and uneasy. I'd walk away hearing the other girls snigger, and it hurt. I didn't cry, but each time it changed something in me, deep down, shaping who I was and who I would become. Each time less confident yet stronger, more insular yet more self-contained. — Poppy Adams

The dodo itself stands as the best emblem of this general truth - that insular evolution often involves transforming an adventurous, high-flying ancestor species into a grounded descendant, no longer capable of going anywhere but extinct. It's our reminder that insular evolution, for all its wondrousness, tends to be a one-way tunnel toward doom. — Quammen, David

Something will be there when the flood recedes. We know that. It will be those people now standing in the water, and on those rooftops - many black, many poor. Homeless. Overlooked. And it will be New Orleans - though its memory may be shortened, its self-gaze and eccentricity scoured out so that what's left is a city more like other cities, less insular, less self-regarding, but possibly more self-knowing after today. A city on firmer ground. — Richard Ford

International friendly games are not worth the lives of the silk worms who perish to make the pennants. They do not even have the philanthropic excuse that softens the otherwise unendurable tedium of testimonial matches. Quite simply, they are rotten games staged to pick the public's pocket, tiresome red tape left over from an era when nations and players were still insular and therefore curious about each other's potential. — Danny Baker

It's a very insular political community up there. I think the court's part of that and they're protecting their own. There's no justice in Vermont today. — Tom Fitton

So, you can define emotions very simply as the process of perceiving what is going on in the organs when you are in the throws of an emotion, and that is achieved by a collection of structures, some of which are in the brain stem, and some of which are in the cerebral cortex, namely the insular cortex, which I like to mention not because I think it's the most important, it's not. — Antonio Damasio

Sometimes Hollywood is a small town on the West Coast of America at the furthest point from everywhere else, and that can make it a little provincial and insular. — Howard Stringer

American politics can produce great men and women, but it is profoundly insular. — George Packer

Contrary to received wisdom, the British are not an insular people in the conventional sense - far from it. For most of their early modern and modern history, they have had more contact with more parts of the world than almost any other nation - it is just that this contact has regularly taken the form of aggressive military and commercial enterprise. — Linda Colley

One of the worst symptoms of HIV is secrecy...if you get HIV? You get secretive. Insular. Paranoid. Your life becomes a giant pretense so no one finds out you have this disease. You don't know what people will do for you because you are too afraid to tell them. — Regan Hofmann

When you grow up in the church, the only translation in that insular world that people understand is preaching. You're supposed to be a minister. So I was going down that path, and then I saw the Tonys. — Billy Porter

I know of no other place that is so fascinating yet so frustrating, so aware of the world and its own place within it but at the same time utterly insular. A country touched by nostalgia, with a past so great - so marked by brilliance and achievement - that French people today seem both enriched and burdened by it. France is like a maddening, moody lover who inspires emotional highs and lows. One minute it fills you with a rush of passion, the next you're full of fury, itching to smack the mouth of some sneering shopkeeper or smug civil servant. Yes, it's a love-hate relationship. — Sarah Turnbull

They're very nationalistic the French - or they used to be. Very insular. Pretty arrogant. — Arthur Boyd

The way that people are watching TV is changing. The landscape of television is changing. Movies are becoming much more insular. They're like a walled garden, where you know what you're going to see and you expect it. But in the world of TV, because it's episodic, you can explore any area because you have time to do that. You can take risks on the kinds of storytelling that you're doing. — Seth Gabel

I focus for periods of time on creative work and I'm very insular during those times - not a lot of socializing. I play when I want. That means I can take off on a retreat, catch a matinee, make friends. My core desired feelings are my time management system. — Danielle LaPorte

In Los Angeles, individuality is very big, because people live in secluded bubbles. People don't walk around. They're very insular, and that allows for people to be whatever they want. — Mario Testino

Most twentysomethings yearn for a feeling of community, and they cling to their strong ties to feel more connected. Ironically, being enmeshed with a group can actually enhance feelings of alienation, because we - and our tribe - become insular and detached. Over time, our initial feeling of being part of a group becomes a sense of disconnection with the larger world. — Meg Jay

I am by nature the most intolerant and insular Englishman ... If you happen to be a person like that and you learn from evidence (which you are prepared to accept) that in the past you have been a Chinese, an Egyptian, a Persian, a Red Indian ... you begin to assume a somewhat less exclusive view of these our fellow men. — Hugh Dowding, 1st Baron Dowding

In Jump Time's developing hybrid world, capacities once nurtured in separate societies are available to the entire family of humankind. This is a stupendous happening, as important as the discovery of new continents during the time of the great sea journeys. For the first time in human history the genius of the human race is available for all to harvest. These rediscovered capacities may be evolutionary accelerators, now being gathered from many places, times, and cultures to awaken our species to who we are and what we yet may be and do. Often, however, it is not comfortable. We can for a time find ourselves strangers in a very strange land, wishing we could return to the comforts of a more insular and familiar worldview. Yet when we get beyond the shutterings of our local cultural trance, we gain the courage to nurture the emerging forms of the possible human and the possible society. — Jean Houston

I was the outsider in Fernhall House, but they were all outsiders really. Outside society. Outside time. You hear people say that those in asylums and care facilities are out of their minds. But in truth their minds are often the one thing they are not out of. Their whole being is sheltering behind walls of muscle and bone. Everything they are - and are not - exists within their sacrosanct headspace. — Jonathan Lee

I'm a cold-hearted bastard. I'm insular, I'm jaded, a workaholic, I'm ruthless and I'm self-serving. I don't do forever, I rarely even do "I'll call you tomorrow". And just because I'm here now it does not mean if you ask me to stay I will. — Ally Blake

Benjamin Netanyahu is a fascinating figure.We say Nixonian about a lot of people. He really is Nixonian. He's brilliant. He's very isolated and insular. — David Brooks

The art world has become so insular. The rules have become so autodidactic that, in a sense, they lose track of what people have any interest in thinking about, talking about or even looking at. — Kehinde Wiley

Acting is a really insular thing. — Robert Carlyle

'Et Tu, Babe' was born out of my absolute certainty that a writer's life was solitary and insular, and I was happy with that. I love reading and writing; it's my whole life. — Mark Leyner

When I was very little, we would get letters from China, in Chinese, and they' be censored. We were a very insular little family. — Maya Lin

Many faculty retreated into academic specializations and an arcane language that made them irrelevant to the task of defending the university as a public good, except for in some cases a very small audience. This has become more and more clear in the last few years as academics have become so insular, often unwilling or unable to defend the university as a public good, in spite of the widespread attacks on academic freedom, the role of the university as a democratic public sphere, and the increasing reduction of knowledge to a saleable commodity, and students to customers. — Henry Giroux

and well-informed insights into their insular world. We all took our seats as a picture of a smiling Paul Verdun in toque was projected up onto screens. White jackets streamed from the kitchen: the amuse-bouche, a shot glass filled with a bite-sized baby octopus cooked in its "natural essence," extra virgin olive oil from Puglia, and a single — Richard C. Morais

I think it's important for whatever you are doing, even if it's a collection, to seek outside advice. If your world becomes too insular, it limits your creativity. — Georgina Chapman

I think it's very difficult in the first go-round for congressional people and political people to understand the linkages that exist between us and the rest of the world. That we're not insular anymore. — Henry Kaufman

As the U.S., much of Europe, and the U.K. shift toward the political right, the rhetoric grows more insular, defensive, and protective. — Samantha Harvey

When I'm making a song that's very Grimes, it just feels very insular and it feels weird to have someone else do something on it. — Grimes

It is true that the Internet can be used to disseminate falsehoods quickly, but it just as quickly roots them out and exposes them in a way that the traditional model of journalism and its closed, insular, one-way form of communication could never do. — Glenn Greenwald

For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. — Herman Melville

I would go home and be this insular girl who listened to music and brooded in her bedroom. — Karen Elson

Scheffer said a new ethnic underclass of immigrants had formed, and it was much too insular, rejecting the values that knit together Dutch society and creating new, damaging social divisions. There wasn't enough insistence on immigrants adapting; teachers even questioned the relevance of teaching immigrant children Dutch history, and a whole generation of these children were being written off under a pretence of tolerance. Scheffer said there was no place in Holland for a culture that rejected the separation of church and state and denied rights to women and homosexuals. He foresaw social unrest. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I can't sit around doing nothing. If I'm not working, I have a habit of becoming rather insular. — Catherine McCormack

There are a whole lot of religious people in America, including the majority of Democrats. When we abandon the field of religious discourse - when we ignore the debate about what it means to be a good Christian or Muslim or Jew; when we discuss religion only in the negative sense of where or how it should not be practiced, rather than in the positive sense of what it tells us about our obligations toward one another; when we shy away from religious venues and religious broadcasts because we assume that we will be unwelcome - others will fill the vacuum. And those who do are likely to be those with the most insular views of faith, or who cynically use religion to justify partisan ends. — Barack Obama

An insular country, subject to fogs, and with a powerful middle class, requires grave statesmen. — Benjamin Disraeli

The United States has an isolationist and insular culture, combined with a global and interventionist posture. This highly dangerous and febrile mixture, which greatly facilitates the task of the fear-mongers and chauvinists, needs a very exact and nuanced diagnosis. I don't think that analogies from the totalitarian model, however suggestive, are sufficient. — Christopher Hitchens

The insular arrogance of the English character is a commonplace joke. — Goldwin Smith

The attitude of foreign to English musicians is unsympathetic, self-opinionated and pedantic. They believe that their tradition is the only one (this is specially true of the Viennese) and that anything that is not in accordance with that tradition is "wrong" and arises from insular ignorance. — Ralph Vaughan Williams

Because economists go through a similar training and share a common method of analysis, they act very much like a guild. The models themselves may be the product of analysis, reflection, and observation, but practitioners' views about the real world develop much more heuristically, as a by-product of informal conversations and socialization among themselves. This kind of echo chamber easily produces overconfidence - in the received wisdom or the model of the day. Meanwhile, the guild mentality renders the profession insular and immune to outside criticism. The models may have problems, but only card-carrying members of the profession are allowed to say so. The objections of outsiders are discounted because they do not understand the models. The profession values smarts over judgment, being interesting over being right - so its fads and fashions do not always self-correct. — Dani Rodrik

To be insular is to be independent. But it is also to be alone. — Peter Ackroyd

Finally, from what we now know about the cosmos, to think that all this was created for just one species among the tens of millions of species who live on one planet circling one of a couple of hundred billion stars that are located in one galaxy among hundreds of billions of galaxies, all of which are in one universe among perhaps an infinite number of universes all nestled within a grand cosmic multiverse, is provincially insular and anthropocentrically blinkered. Which is more likely? That the universe was designed just for us, or that we see the universe as having been designed just for us? — Michael Shermer

I find that working with friends is always the goal, even if it's just one person. Because the comedy community is kind of insular, it's easy to run into people you've worked with, even if you worked with someone on something for a day, or whatever. — Lizzy Caplan

I'll now fall back a furlong or two in me chair, while me larned but misguided collagues r-read th' Histhry iv Iceland to show ye how wrong I am. But mind ye, what I 've said goes. I let thim talk because it exercises their throats, but ye 've heard all th' decision on this limon case that'll get into th' fourth reader.' A voice fr'm th' audjeence, ' Do I get me money back ? ' Brown J. : ' Who ar-re ye ? ' Th' Voice : ' Th' man that ownded th' limons.' Brown J. : ' I don't know.' (Gray J., White J., dissentin' an' th' r-rest iv th' birds concurrin' but fr entirely diff'rent reasons.) — Finley Peter Dunne

I think the city of Washington itself is insular to a certain extent. You have to get out in the country to realize what is going on and discover that the perceptions in Washington aren't necessarily accurate. — Rosalynn Carter

One of the enduring lessons of history is that whenever an empire becomes insular to 'protect' itself, intellectual decline and cultural intolerance are sure to follow. — Irshad Manji

The challenge is always as a writer, is this going to work, because it's a very intimate process, and I tend to be very introverted and insular, and when I write, it's in my head. — Gloria Estefan

Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.
Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return! — Herman Melville

Americans abroad have long been accused of such blinging arrogance and display. I find the charge generally unfair. Arrogance is incorrectly ascribed to what is really the cultural clumsiness of an insular (if continental) people less exposed to foreign ways and languages than most other people on Earth.
True, America as a nation is not very good at humility. But it would be completely unnatural for the dominant military, cultural and technological power on the plant to adopt the demeanor or, say, Liechtenstein. The ensuing criticism is particularly grating when it comes from the likes of the French, British, Spanish, Dutch (there are many others) who just yesterday claimed dominion over every land and people their Captain Cooks ever stumbled upon. — Charles Krauthammer

I live in a sort of insular world. It's mostly my family, my house, staying home and working. — Mark Hamill

For the past thirty-nine years since I had graduated from college, I had called my parents on Sundays. They had expected and looked forward to the ritual. After Dad died, I still called Mom on Sundays. Most of the time I dreaded the call because she had become more and more insular and was full of complaints about the assisted living facility, the other residents, her health, everything. She had become narrow in her interests in life, more negative, more critical, and unhappier. I was reminded of something I had heard from a psychologist about what happens as we age. He said we become more of who we are, not less. Our energy to fight back the negative attributes we all possess is not as strong as we get older. So we can become more cantankerous, more irritable. I also remembered what my father had often said: "There but for the grace of God go I." That Sunday I placed the — Janis Heaphy Durham

I'm aware of the- the fact that people elsewhere in the world think differently from us. I can sort of see us, us Americans with their eyes. And not all that I see is- is attractive. I see an insular people who are- are insensitive to foreign sensibilities, who are lazy, obese, complacent and increasingly perplexed as to why we are losing our place in the world to people who are more dynamic than us and more disciplined — Edmund Morris

Trump's America is not America: not today's or tomorrow's, but yesterday's.

Trump's America is brutal, perverse, regressive, insular and afraid. There is no hope in it; there is no light in it. It is a vast expanse of darkness and desolation.

And that is a vision of America that most of the people in this country cannot and will not abide. — Charles M. Blow

The English have a scornful insular way Of calling the French light. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

A door jumps
out from shadows,
then jumps away. This
is what I've come to find:
the back door, unlatched.
Tooled by insular wind, it
slams and slams
without meaning
to and without meaning. — Li-Young Lee

There was scant precedent for the prickly kind of pop the Pixies played, and their sound is recognizable on the slightest whiff. It's a series of opposing forces that fit together incongruously but exquisitely: a bouncy yet firm bassline (Deal called it "boingy-boingysproingy") joined to a demented choir of punky guitars; Thompson's harsh primal scream beside Deal's coy and smoky harmonies; explosive, grating riffs in songs crafted from prime bubblegum. Behind it all is Thompson's song-writing, playful but also insular, inscrutable. — Ben Sisario

With high fashion, it's a performance. You're trying to interpret a fantasy in a very physical way, and you really are playing a character. I've played men, dead people, famous people, historical icons, and it's no mean feat. It's quite an insular experience even though the crowd is in front of you and there's an expectation. — Erin O'Connor

Contemporary writers annoyed him, he found their worlds insular, their style too self-conscious and ironic. Theirs was not a literature that belonged to him. — Christos Tsiolkas

By itself, just to draw crazy creatures has limited appeal - if I had to give up one thing, it would be the wild imagination. When the work becomes too detached from ordinary life, it starts to fall apart. Fantasy needs to have some connection with reality, or it becomes of its own interest only, insular. — Shaun Tan

A church that is self-focused and insular is a social club, not a church. — Adam S. McHugh

I often think of the novel as a form that celebrates social groups, and the short story being a form that is capable of celebrating an individual or a sort of insular little pair of people. — Antonya Nelson