Island Of The Blue Dolphins Quotes & Sayings

Why do I write historical fiction? Johnny Tremain, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Island of the Blue Dolphins-that's why. I'll never forget how it felt to read those books. I want to write books with the same power to transport readers into another time and place. — Jennifer Armstrong

The way to get a deciduous hedge for free is to ask a neighbor to let you take divisions from his shrubs. You can take ten or twenty sucker-like shoots with their roots attached before he will notice and start to feel like a sucker himself. Thank him profusely and suggest that you'd love to have him and the wife over to dinner sometime, but don't give a specific date. Perhaps in the winter, you might suggest, when there's not so much work to do in the yard.
... in about three to five years the little suckers will grow into an informal hedge whose height will depend on the type of shrub you have selected. I know three to five years is a long time when you're middle-aged and older. But what do you want? You've just glommed several hundred dollars' worth of shrubs for free, for heaven's sake. In three to five years your neighbor will have forgotten about that dinner, also. — Cassandra Danz

Aegean Islands 1940-41

Where white stares, smokes or breaks,
Thread white, white of plaster and of foam,
Where sea like a wall falls;
Ribbed, lionish coast,
The stony islands which blow into my mind
More often than I imagine my grassy home;

To sun one's bones beside the
Explosive, crushed-blue, nostril-opening sea
(The weaving sea, splintered with sails and foam,
Familiar of famous and deserted harbours,
Of coins with dolphins on and fallen pillars.)

To know the gear and skill of sailing,
The drenching race for home and the sail-white houses,
Stories of Turks and smoky ikons,
Cry of the bagpipe, treading
Of the peasant dancers;

The dark bread
The island wine and the sweet dishes;
All these were elements in a happiness
More distant now than any date like '40,
A. D. or B. C., ever can express. — Bernard Spencer

You know, I've certainly gone through periods, once I got into this business, where I tried to adopt maybe a more sophisticated style, 'cause they give you all these free clothes. — Edward Burns

That's why I think death is the most wonderful invention of life. It purges the system of these old models that are obsolete. I think that's one of Apple's challenges, really. When two young people walk in with the next thing, are we going to embrace it and say this is fantastic? Are you going to be willing to drop our models, or are we going to explain it away? I think we'll do better, because we're completely aware of it and we make it a priority. — Steve Jobs

You were the vessel of evil. The Evil is poured out. It is done. It is buried in it's own tomb. You were never made for cruelty and darkness; you were made to hold light — Ursula K. Le Guin

We are such sticklers for tradition in insisting on an amateur captain, regardless of the question of whether he can pull his weight as a player. The time is coming when we will have to change our views [...] when there will be no amateurs of sufficient ability to put into an England side. — John Berry Hobbs

If you've brains it's better than beauty - brains last, beauty doesn't. — L.M. Montgomery

Love is wild and unruly and it does what it wants with our hearts without us having any say in it. It's beautiful and paralyzing and breathtaking. And it kills us because it's the only thing that keeps us alive. Love doesn't play our games because love is a completely different game in and of itself. — Kandi Steiner

Now, suddenly, I was the kind of girl who felt true physical pain when asked to put down a book at the dinner table, who asked friends over and ignored them to finish Island of the Blue Dolphins for the fifth time. — Lizzie Skurnick

Everyone wants to save Man, but no one wants to know about men. — Jose Saramago

One of the most basic and pervasive social processes is the sorting and labeling of things, activities, and people ... Sorting and labeling processes involve a trade-off of costs and benefits. In general, the more finely the sorting is done, the greater the benefits - and the costs ... Sorting and labeling, whether of people or of things, is a sorting and labeling of probabilities rather than of certainties. — Thomas Sowell

Turning all this over in my mind, I started to imagine another me somewhere, sitting in a bar, nursing a whiskey, without a care in the world. The more I thought about it, the more that other me became the real me, making this me here not real at all. — Haruki Murakami

In fact, I want to be a Transformer as an adult. I would transform into a Gulf Stream 500. — Brad Delson