On The Island Quotes

#1. You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.

Henry David Thoreau

#2. There was a saying on the island: "[I]t is a pity to spoil a good mate by making him a master.

Nathaniel Philbrick

#3. When you find a diamond that belongs to nobody, it is yours. When you discover an island that belongs to nobody, it is yours. When you get an idea before any one else, you take out a patent on it : it is yours. So with me : I own the stars, because nobody else before me ever thought of owning them.

Antoine De Saint-Exupery

#4. But by spring, she had again yielded to the tug and tide of his mind, allowing its currents to carry her back across the continent and wash them up on the remote shores of his evergreen island..

Ruth Ozeki

#5. 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

#6. Every year I spend one month just sailing, but I still work when I'm on the boat. You never separate work from leisure. A boat is like a magic world, like a little island.

Renzo Piano

#7. 'Rescue From Gilligan's Island' was the first of the so-called reunion shows on the networks, getting a 54 share. With numbers like that, everybody else started to have reunion shows.

Sherwood Schwartz

#8. An island always pleases my imagination, even the smallest, as a small continent and integral portion of the globe. I have a fancyfor building my hut on one. Even a bare, grassy isle, which I can see entirely over at a glance, has some undefined and mysterious charm for me.

Henry David Thoreau

#9. 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

#10. It is this kind of resourcefulness, I think, that explains how this hardy band of Vikings managed to survive more than one thousand years on an island that is about as hospitable to human habitation as the planet Pluto - if Pluto were a planet, that is, which it's not.

Eric Weiner

#11. If a hundred people were shipwrecked on an island, what would it even mean to say that everyone there has a "right" to food, or that everyone has a "right" to health care, or the "right" to a job, or the "right" to a "living wage"?

Larken Rose

#12. People in San Francisco and the East Bay have shown interest, done interviews, and have come to shows. I guess that the news travels fast out of this island that we are on.

Joanna Newsom

#13. The yachts' berth was next to the Yas Marina Circuit, where Formula 1 would come into town once a year. At night, when the lights on its orbicular architecture switched on, the circuit would radiate like a constellation of stars

Soroosh Shahrivar

#14. For a summer of drug abuse on the island of Capri, she packed a wardrobe of black Morticia gowns, dyed her hair green, and paraded through the village streets with a crystal ball, followed by a retainer in gold body paint.

Scot D. Ryersson

#15. I'll disappear in the fog as a foreigner to all life, as a human island detached from the dream of the sea, as a uselessly existing ship that floats on the surface of everything.

Fernando Pessoa

#16. Indeed, most magicians catch the bug as kids. My first audience was my family in Long Island. My first 'assistant' was my mother, whom I levitated on a broom in our living room.

Criss Angel

#17. I'm not sure that when I read 'Treasure Island' for the first time, when I was about 10, I understood all the words or what was going on. But that didn't stop me reading it, and I certainly didn't forget it.

Mal Peet

#18. We are all trying to get to the same island, whether you swim, fly, surf or skydiving. What matters is when the red light comes on.
Jerry Seinfeld to Michael Richards in Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.

Jerry Seinfeld

#19. Situated on an island which I think it will one day cover, it rises like Venice from the sea, and like that fairest of cities in the days of her glory, receives into its lap tribute of all the riches of the earth.

Frances Trollope

#20. I'm French. I have not become an Englishman. I have the impression of living on an island called Arsenal. If you fancy a sightseeing tour of London, don't ask me. You would get lost.

Arsene Wenger

#21. In the year 540 B.C. or thereabouts, on the island of Samos, there came to power a tyrant named Polycrates. He seems to have started as a caterer and then gone on to international piracy.

Carl Sagan

#22. Richard Price, who has made a fortune writing fake ghetto books, says he takes a cab into the ghetto, transcribes Black speech for a brief time and returns home. His fake ghetto books have bought him a townhouse in Gramercy Park and home on Staten Island.

Ishmael Reed

#23. There is no easy way out of our circumstances...Sometimes you stick it out even when you want to give up because you know that on the other side is either a better situation or a better you." -Watercrossing (Phantom Island Book 3)

Krissi Dallas

#24. There is a beehive under every pot of honey on the island of Manhattan,

Adriana Trigiani

#25. ...there was no escaping the monsters, not even on this island, no bigger on a map than a grain of sand, protected by mountains of fog and sharp rocks and seething tides. Not anywhere. That was the awful truth...

Ransom Riggs

#26. Apparently tired of waiting for clear direction from Congress, the people of Puerto Rico have used the tools provided by their own local constitution to schedule a vote for Dec. 13 on the status of the island.

Dick Thornburgh

#27. There were only two men on the planet better educated in the various martial arts than Butler, and he was related to one of them. The other lived on an island in the South China Sea, and spent his days meditating and beating up palm trees. You had to feel sorry for the B'wa Kell.

Eoin Colfer

#28. When you try hard to find happiness for other, you will unknowingly find yourself on the island of happiness.

Debasish Mridha

#29. Water makes me feel at peace. In Corsica, I spend most of my time on the beaches or in the rivers. That's one reason I love it there so much. The water is so clean and fresh - you can drink it straight out of the rivers! This island is my secret garden.

Laetitia Casta

#30. Girls were not named for flowers, as flowers died so quickly. Girls were named for deathless things - forms of light, forms of cloud, shapes of stars, that which appears and disappears like an island on the horizon.

Louise Erdrich

#31. Boredom will eventually set in ... and one day you'll be standing still on an island, with no idea where to go, because all your bridges will have been burned ... The smaller you are, the larger and more terrifying the world. You should not be trying to reduce yourself so thoroughly.

Kristina Meister

#32. If I was on an island, just for melody, I would take albums by the Stones, AC/DC and the Beach Boys' Smiley Smile.

Steven Tyler

#33. We just sat there and watched the plane pass the island, and it never came back," he said. "I could see it on the radar. It makes you feel terrible. Life was cheap in war.

Laura Hillenbrand

#34. Teddy laughed, heard the sound of it carry off on the sweep of night air and dissolve in the distant surf, as if it had never been, as if the island and the sea and the salt took what you thought you had and ...

Dennis Lehane

#35. Our normal sense of the person as a lonely island of consciousness, is a dramatic illusion based on theological imagery.

Alan Watts

#36. One Saturday, he had gone to take the subway to Pennsylvania Station en route for the Soviet week-end rest camp at Glen Cove, the former Morgan estate on Long Island.

Ian Fleming

#37. An evil brute grows strong and now is on the verge of crossing over from the island to the world you know. His name is Hubal, and his strength grows as your world's lightness folds.

Soroosh Shahrivar

#38. Since I decided to buy an island and move there with my favorite volleyball," Deacon shot back, watched his friend's lips twitch, ignored it, and moved into the room, shrugging off his coat and throwing it on the bed.

Kristen Ashley

#39. I loved Le Taha'a private resort in Tahiti. It's accessible only by private boat or helicopter, and it sits on a tiny strip of land just big enough for one hotel. It's extraordinary and faces the Vanilla Island where Tahitians grow vanilla.

Marie Helvin

#40. Let memories of your own hometown flow back to you as you read this fascinating story, "A Place called Gouyave," about the author's recollection of the characters, stories and the lessons learnt in his hometown during his youth on the Caribbean island of Grenada.

Collis Decoteau

#41. On my second swim at Deception Island, the water was very clear and I was looking at hundreds of whale bones beneath me. It was a graveyard from the whaling some time in the 1920s-30s.

Lewis Gordon Pugh

#42. When the Allies bombed the Italians on the island of Pantelleria in June, 1943, General Spaatz, of the United States Air Corps, concluded that bombing can reduce to the point of surrender any first-class nation now in existence, within six months.

Paul Fussell

#43. She was back on the island. On Yamatai. A hellish storm raged all around her.

Dan Abnett

#44. We are Sinclairs. Beautiful. Privileged. Damaged. Liar. We live, least in the summertime, on a private island off the coast of Massachusetts. Perhaps that is all you need to know.

E. Lockhart

#45. The best-educated doctor in the world is standing on a low island in the middle of a sea of ignorance.

Stephen King

#46. Puerto Rico has a stray dog problem. Tens of thousands of homeless canines - hundreds of thousands, by some estimates - live and die on the streets and beaches all over this Caribbean island of almost four million people.

Juliana Hatfield

#47. I love to cook, my husband and I collect wine, and in my head, I am always on Sullivan's Island, walking the beach listening to the song of the ocean.

Dorothea Benton Frank

#48. For now I sit on my final island of the present as my radius of memory shrinks; lost already are the islands of work, of old friendships ... Other islands fade as I brood upon them.

Chuma Nwokolo

#49. For an hour we talked of Anne and that famous farm on Prince Edward Island. Thus the friendship began.

Kathy Reichs

#50. As the people of Shishmaref lose their natural hunting grounds to the warming sea, they are forced to buy U.S. canned goods from the only local store on the island; however, this is not their natural diet and cannot sustain them throughout the year.

Amy J. Berg

#51. If I'm on location on some island, we usually get up at four in the morning to set up. By seven thirty, we're on the beach working until noon, then we rest. It's not exactly a vacation.

Daniela Pestova

#52. He cupped my face in his hands and wiped my tears with his thumbs.
"Better?"
"Yes."
He looked into my eyes and said, "I'll never leave you alone, Anna. Not if I can help it.

Tracey Garvis-Graves

#53. Let's see, today is Thor's Day the sixteenth." "You mean Thursday?" "That's what I said. The island will rise on the full moon six days from now, on the twenty-second, which is Woden's Day." "Wednesday?" I asked. "That's what I said.

Rick Riordan

#54. While still a student, Napoleon had written on the last page of his geography book: "St. Helena. Small island." This may have been what we call a coincidence, but the thought must certainly have aroused terror in him in his last days.

Ryunosuke Akutagawa

#55. Usually halfway through a book I have a serious depression, so I go on safari on my ranch in South Africa, or fishing off my island in the Seychelles. When I come back and re-read it, I think: 'What was all that about, Smith? It's fine, just get on with it.'

Wilbur Smith

#56. We need to get serious about combating gang violence on Long Island, and the entire nation.

Tim Bishop

#57. I should have liked this particular story to end with me settled happily ever after in the hut on the island, but it didn't happen. It wasn't long before I had to face the fact that I was living in the sea.

Meg Rosoff

#58. Souls dance undressed/ together/ and like loiterers/ on the fringes of a fair/ we ogle the unobtainable/ imagined mystery/ Yet away around on the far side/ like a stage door of a circus tent/ is a wide vent in the battlements/ where even elephants/ waltz thru
pg. 31// A Coney Island of the Mind

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#59. I don't think my memory of that night is ever coming back."
"Do you want me to hit you on the head with a coconut? It works on Gilligan's Island.

Jennifer Echols

#60. The peculiarity for which they'd been hunted was simply their Jewishness. They were orphans of war, washed up on that little island in a tide of blood.

Ransom Riggs

#61. In Poetry class, Professor Sappho teaches us how to compose love ballads. She's a swell teacher and all but I'm not sure I understand her. She's always going on and on about her weekend trips with the other goddesses to the island of Lesbos.

Tai

#62. And I really wanted a driver's license. I was 43, had my learner's permit and had failed the test once already - but that was in Riverhead, on Long Island.

Suzanne Vega

#63. I go down to Newport and Huntington a lot. It's more crowded than where I grew up on Phillip Island, but I think it's helped me adjust to life in America - getting into the water as much as I can.

Liam Hemsworth

#64. I'd go to Coney Island to hang out, and I saw a magician doing a rope trick on the boardwalk. I was fascinated. I guess that's how it started.

David Blaine

#65. 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

#66. I always like to look for adventure when I go away. I have gone on several horse adventures with my wife - from Guangxi we went up to the High Tibetan region. We also went along the Hurunui River on horseback in the South Island of New Zealand.

Antony Gormley

#67. It is no coincidence that when the thugs tried to wrest control over Grenada, there were 30 Soviet advisors and hundreds of Cuban military and paramilitary forces on the island.

Ronald Reagan

#68. You must love the land, my children, and ring it in with your love. For the land is the most precious thing on this island. It is like rain, like the heart of a woman.

Wu Ming-Yi

#69. We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

Winston Churchill

#70. I think I'm Swedish because I like to live here on this island. You can't imagine the loneliness and isolation in this country. In that way, I'm very Swedish - I don't dislike to be alone.

Ingmar Bergman

#71. Here were thirty-two guards on the island, and I escaped.

Megan Miranda

#72. Solomon Island scourges, dysentery, had struck Berande plantation, and he was all alone to cope with it. Also, he was afflicted himself. By stooping close, still on man-back, he managed to pass through the low doorway. He took

Jack London

#73. When you grow up on an island, what matters is how you stand to the sea.

Roddy Doyle

#74. 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

#75. I was born and raised on a Carolina sea island and I carried the sunshine of the low-country, inked in dark gold, on my back and shoulders.

Pat Conroy

#76. There is more treasure n books than in all the pirates' loot on Treasure Island and at the bottom of the Spanish Main ... and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.

Walt Disney Company

#77. There is a scene in the movie where Astrid and Hiccup fly on Toothless's back toward the island of Berk. The animation is intensely real, from the waves on the sea to wisps of wind blowing in the characters' hair. The feeling I get watching that scene is why I fly - just for that feeling.

Craig Ferguson

#78. If you go to old houses on Long Island you will see painted Chinese wallpaper, which was big in the 18th century. Throughout history, notable, established families have always tried to link to the 18th century.

Catherine Martin

#79. Perhaps if I knew I would be stranded on an island with but one book, I would choose the Bible. For no religious reason whatsoever, but because of the varieties of stories, which might be useful as the days pass.

Edward P. Jones

#80. I forgave her, of course. I always did; I had to, because there were only the two of us. The two of us on our thorn-encircled island, waiting for rescue; and, on the mainland, everyone else.

Margaret Atwood

#81. I'm from Kingston, R.I., sort of on the University of Rhode Island campus - on the margins of that, actually.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#82. Island Records used what we built and tried to cash in on it which is so annoying. So it came time to do Carver City record and Island wanted to do it and we're just like "What's the point?" I mean, at that point they were even admitting like, "Yeah, we're just gonna do what we've always done."

Jess Margera

#83. He folded into my arms. I buried my face in his hair, and I listened to the sounds of midsummer on my island. Gorse pods were crackling in the sun. When the wind shifted, I could hear the voice of the sea, woven through always with birdsong and mermaids.

Harper Fox

#84. Have we even so much as discovered and settled the shores? Let a man travel on foot along the coastand tell me if it looks like a discovered and settled country, and not rather, for the most part, like a desolate island, and No-Man's Land.

Henry David Thoreau

#85. I didn't spend my whole summer training with Anwar and him on a deserted island in the Baltic sea to stand here and do nothing.

Rebekkah Ford

#86. My husband and I went to Bald Head Island for our four-year anniversary. We spent the night in bed with champagne, tequila and Krispy Kreme doughnuts and watched a boxing match on Showtime.

Teri Polo

#87. I used to work out on an island called Martha's Vineyard. I ran a pizza oven, I caddied, I worked on a fishing boat, and life is very easy out there. It's a vacation lifestyle all the time.

Austin Stowell

#88. No well-bred person goes ashore on someone else's island when there's no one home. But if they put up a sign, then you do it anyway, because it's a slap in the face

Tove Jansson

#89. The purpose of freedom is to create it for others. Prison desk calendar, written on Robben Island, June 2, 1979

Nelson Mandela

#90. I was born in the shadow of World War II, on December 18, 1939, on the South Shore of Long Island, a product of the early -wentieth-century emigration of Eastern European Jewry to New York City and its environs.

Harold E. Varmus

#91. 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

#92. By their victory, the 3rd, 4th and 5th Marine Divisions and other units of the Fifth Amphibious Corps have made an accounting to their country which only history will be able to value fully. Among the Americans who served on Iwo Island, uncommon valor was a common virtue.

Chester W. Nimitz

#93. The Humpback Trail on New Zealand's South Island is really beautiful. It is a 70 km walk over about four days and is fairly arduous. You go through prehistoric forest and up to the top of Humpback Mountain, where there are amazing views down to the Tasman Sea.

Toby Stephens

#94. And balancing on eye beams/ above a sea of faces/ paces his way/ to the other side of day
pg. 30// // A Coney Island of the Mind

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#95. We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.

John Archibald Wheeler

#96. So it is, out here on this island, where we dwell with our faces to the sea and our backs to the wilderness. Like Adam's family after the fall, we all have things to do.

Geraldine Brooks

#97. As the mother of the ten-month-old hospitalized in San Diego said, if people want to make that choice, they should go live on an island with its own schools and doctors: "their own little infectious disease island.

Deborah Blum

#98. There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate's loot on Treasure Island. - WALT DISNEY

Ellery Adams

#99. I wanted people to believe that there could still be this little undiscovered piece of the world that survives still on Skull Island.

Peter Jackson

#100. 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