Top 100 Quotes About Islands
#1. Monsieur Franqulin, inventor of electricity. This
illustrious savant, after having made several voyages around the
world, died on the Sandwich Islands and was devoured by savages,
of whom not a single fragment was ever recovered.
Ambrose Bierce
#2. The good news was that Enterprise and the newly arrived Yorktown had attacked the Marshall and Gilbert islands. Those attacks had a great effect on morale.
Jack Adams
#3. The sophisticates of Java, the traders of Sumatra, the peasants from the outer islands found no common ground. During siesta time from one to five, the Islamic group met separately, the Nationalist group met separately, the Federalist and Unitarians met separately.
Sukarno
#4. Somehow, the love of the islands, like the love of a woman, just happens. One cannot determine in advance to love a particular woman, nor can one so determine to love Hawaii.
Jack London
#5. It sucks, but no Long Islands or margaritas when you drink. It has to be straight vodka.
Nicole Polizzi
#6. One of the things that confirmed Hyacinth's suspicion that America was an evil, lonely place was that people were islands unto themselves. And so when Avril drifted away, there was no friend or neighbor or pastor or coworker to reach out to and ask after her child.
Naomi Jackson
#7. When you're fully healed," she said sternly, then spoiled it with a silvery, velvet-coated laugh. "Oh, Lucivar, the dragons who live on the Fyreborn Islands are going to love you. You not only have wings, you're big enough to wave whomp.
Anne Bishop
#8. We were not many, and the world was very small. There were strange lands to the east- islands like Akutan; so we thought all the world was islands, and did not mind.
Jack London
#9. Position yourself to succeed by doing the other things in your life that rejuvenate you. You can create little islands of time away from your novel that will help preserve your balance. Exhaustion will affect both your writing's quality and your productivity.
Jeff VanderMeer
#10. Verse 11. (They presented unto Him gifts). The people of the east never approach the presence of kings and great personages, without a present in their hands. The custom is often noticed in the Old Testament, and still prevails in the east, and in some of the newly discovered South Sea Islands.
Adam Clarke
#11. Islands - of times when you're content, you don't think about the loss. Now it's like your world's underwater. All of it. But the water goes down and the islands come up. The water'll be there always but you'll find dry land
Jeffery Deaver
#12. Not only are islands impoverished relative to the mainlands, but small islands are more severely impoverished than large ones. That bit of insight became famed as the species-area relationship.
David Quammen
#13. Through the sunset of hope,
Like the shapes of a dream,
What paradise islands of glory gleam!
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#14. Your life is an island separated from all other islands and continents. Regardless of how many boats you send to other shores or how many ships arrive upon your shores, you yourself are an island separated by its own pains, secluded in its happiness
Khalil Gibran
#15. When the earthquake hit Haiti in 2010, I was on vacation in the Cayman Islands.
Jose Andres
#16. Throughout history, men have tried to play God by moving rabbits, goats, sparrows, mongooses, and a hundred other species to oceanic islands and island continents, and later have wished to God they hadn't.
Victor Blanchard Scheffer
#17. Douglas Mock has assembled the animal behavioural evidence in More than Kin and Less than Kind.6 In the Galapagos Islands young fur seals attack their newborn siblings, seizing them by the throat and tossing them into the air, killing them unless the mother seal intervenes.
Jonathan Sacks
#18. Who will bear witness to these small islands and oases of wildness as land is divided and sold to become strip malls, housing developments,and parking lots? What happens to the natural history here? We must bear witness.
Joni L. James
#19. We're performing several shows in the Canary Islands.
George Duke
#20. Each year, I await with dread the federal government's catalog of endangered and threatened species in the Hawaiian Islands, where I was raised and where I live.
Susanna Moore
#21. I was moving in a narrow range between busy distractedness and a pervasive sadness whose granules seemed to enter each cell, weighing it down ... I ghosted between islands of anxiety ... a fatigue that dulled my zest, decanted it. Sorrow felt like a marble coat I couldn't shed.
Diane Ackerman
#22. Indonesia's diversity is formidable: some thirteen and a half thousand islands, two hundred and fifty million people, around three hundred and sixty ethnic groups, and more than seven hundred languages.
Pankaj Mishra
#23. They are supposed to be dispassionate dispensers of Pure Justice, icy islands of emotionless calculation. In short, umpires should be acute Republicans.
George Will
#24. I cannot lead you into battle. I do not give you laws or administer justice but I can do something else - I can give my heart and my devotion to these old islands and to all the peoples of our brotherhood of nations.
Queen Elizabeth II
#25. We cannot have islands of excellence in a sea of slovenly indifference to standards.
John W. Gardner
#26. Assad: 'I have written it just down here.'
He Pointed to a number of Arabic symbols that could just as well have meant it was going to snow in the Lofoten Islands in the morning.
Jussi Adler-Olsen
#27. It is Cameron's cabinet of millionaires who are the real spongers given free rein to live out their Thatcherite fantasies at the expense of ordinary, decent communities throughout these islands.
Martin McGuinness
#28. The bald unpalatable fact is emphasized that the Highlands and Islands are largely a devastated terrain, and that any policy which ignores this fact cannot hope to achieve rehabilitation.
Frank Fraser Darling
#29. I started to draw desert islands. They were just rough, shapes in the middle of the page. Then I began drawing shapes within those shapes and I was amazed how quickly the islands got better. It took off from there.
Billy Connolly
#30. Have an eye to the molasses tierce, Mr. Stubb; it was a little leaky, I thought. If ye touch at the islands, Mr. Flask, beware of fornication.
Herman Melville
#31. At school, if I was ever bored in class, I would draw maps of islands or detailed interior of boats or lists of provisions and equipment I would need when I went camping in the summer.
Michelle Magorian
#32. My parents stood still. It was like we were on two separate islands. Mom and Dad were on one, and I was on the other. And the ocean between us was the symbol of truth. The thing representing our truce.
Jenelle Jack Pierre
#33. The Sandwich Islands are not the same as Otaheite nor as the Fijis, from which they are distant about 4,000 miles, nor are their people of the same race. The natives are not cannibals, and it is doubtful if they ever were so. Their idols only exist in missionary museums.
Isabella Bird
#34. On December 5, 1941, Chicago led a task force built around the carrier Lexington to Midway Island, at the western end of the Hawaiian Islands, about 1,000 miles from Pearl Harbor.
Jack Adams
#35. We had generals who were admirals and admirals who wanted to be generals. Generals acting as admirals are bad enough, but it was the admirals who wanted to be generals who imperiled victory among the coral islands.
Holland Smith
#36. Interestingly enough after diving to 235 feet in Saba, I visited the Virgin Islands. There, as a pure Karmic coincidence, I met the inventor of the snowboard, Steve Sanders, Mr. Burton's brother.
Frederick Lenz
#37. I did not deliberately invent Earthsea, I did not think 'Hey wow - islands are archetypes and archipelagoes are superarchetypes and let's build us an archipelago! I am not an engineer, but an explorer. I discovered Earthsea.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#38. Life is islands of ecstasy in an ocean of ennui, and after the age of thirty land is seldom seen.
Luke Rhinehart
#39. Any frequent visitor to Hawaii is fixated on mapping how the islands have changed since their last visit.
Hanya Yanagihara
#40. I have this weird tropism for islands. Take me to an island as far from New York as I can possibly go.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#41. In front of us lay a smooth sandy beach, beyond which rose gradually a high wooded country, and behind us was the sea, studded with numerous islands of every variety of form.
George Grey
#42. Pacific Islands are among those that contribute least to global warming, yet suffer most.
Ban Ki-moon
#43. Lest those islands still seem to you too remote in space and time to be relevant to our modern societies, just think about the risks ... of our increasing globalization and increasing worldwide economic interdependence.
Jared Diamond
#44. My chin is weak. I find it hard to make decisions. For years I had been caught between the two stools of security on the land and rich-scented life on the exotic islands of literature.
I wasn't really a writer. I had seen a strange beautiful light on the hills and that was all.
Patrick Kavanagh
#45. And she wanted him. And anyway, once a mermaid saved a man, wasn't he destined to be her true love, with weddings on ships or private islands and happily-ever-afters filled with music and sparkles and talking fish?
Kerry Adrienne
#46. You show me continents, I see the islands, You count the centuries, I blink my eyes.
Bjork
#47. Were this world an endless pain, and by sailing eastward we could forever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage.
Herman Melville
#48. Among us we represent islands of time as well as separate oceans of perspective.
Dan Simmons
#49. White villas glittered against the olive woods! What quiet harbours, thronged with gallant shipping bound for purple islands of wine and spice, islands set low in languorous waters!
Kenneth Grahame
#50. The Senkaku Islands are an integral part of Japanese territory based on international law as well as in the context of our history.
Shinzo Abe
#51. We draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearl-like, from our souls without real pain. Fiction
Neil Gaiman
#52. Moving islands in the ocean of sky.
Beautiful white curtains in the sky,
Veiling and unveiling portions, as time passes by.
I watch clouds, when my mind feels clouded.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
#53. When you're on one of the Caribbean islands, sometimes it's hard to picture how they fit in with the rest, but when you see them all joined together like a necklace from space, you see the natural geographic connectedness of them all.
Chris Hadfield
#54. Keep a copy of 'Islands in the Stream' by Ernest Hemingway on the left hand side of your desk. Keep Fitzgerald's 'The Crack Up' on the right. When you get stuck, pick them up and pretend that they are having a fight, like you used to do with your GI Joes.
Lynn Coady
#55. The northeast trade winds that blow at a steady fifteen knots onto the cliffs and reefs of the islands' lee shores produce endless trains of eminently glidable waves.
Simon Winchester
#56. California is an island, and New York's an island. Maybe it's time for me to change islands.
Paul Mazursky
#57. Small islands, not capable of protecting themselves, are the proper objects for kingdoms to take under their care; but there is something absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island.
Thomas Paine
#58. Only as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the meaning of their hanging-gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands, parks, and preserves.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#59. For God's sake, man," Ovid nearly shouted, "the damn globe is catching fire, and the islands are drowning. The evidence is staring them in the face.
Barbara Kingsolver
#61. We have all at one time been stranded on islands shouting lies across the seas of misunderstanding, hoping the fog will carry our mischief to the distant ports in people's minds.
Shannon L. Alder
#62. Why come back to this empty house, and this Manila with a strange face; the one I never knew? All those lonely islands. They will keep afloat without me.
V.J. Campilan
#63. Each person is an island unto himself, in a very real sense; and he can only build bridges to other islands if he is first of all willing to be himself and permitted to be himself.
Carl Rogers
#64. Three big islands, Kyushu, Shikoku, and Honshu? And thousands of little ones. There's another island far to the north - some say it's the mainland - called Hokkaido, but only hairy natives
James Clavell
#65. The former colonies, in Latin America in particular, have a better chance than ever before to overcome centuries of subjugation, violence and foreign intervention, which they have so far survived as dependencies with islands of luxury in a sea of misery.
Noam Chomsky
#66. No footprints in the sand. Pebbles and bits of weed are strung in scalloped lines. Three outer islands bear low stone forts; a green lantern glows on the tip of a jetty. It feels appropriate somehow, to have reached the edge of the continent, to have only the hammered sea left in front of him.
Anthony Doerr
#67. Trade unions are islands of anarchy in a sea of chaos.
Aneurin Bevan
#68. The Falklands held a mirror up to our own islands, and it reflected, in brilliantly sharp focus, all our injured belittlement, our sense of being beleaguered, neglected and misunderstood.
Jonathan Raban
#69. August for the people and their favourite islands. Daily the steamers sidle up to meet The effusive welcome of the pier.
W. H. Auden
#70. Amboyna seems to present the most favorable opening. Fifty thousand souls are there perishing without the means of life, and the situation of the island is such that a mission there established might, with the blessing of God, be extended to the neighboring islands in those seas.
Adoniram Judson
#71. Funny that. We live in islands of Hours and we never seem to have time enough for anything ...
Clive Barker
#72. They would emerge a short distance away, sometimes three or four of them, a short lived archipelago of volcanic islands.
Yann Martel
#73. I love travelling, and had the pleasure of being in the most developed country in the world and then parts of two of the most pristine natural areas of the world: the Galapagos islands and the Equador Amazon jungle. The contrast was incredible.
Adam Garcia
#74. In the sea of grief, there were islands of grace, moments in time when one could remember what was left rather than all that had been lost.
Kristin Hannah
#75. The sky was as blue as a stupid postcard, and the islands were as green as islands.
M T Anderson
#76. It must be those brief moments when nothing has happened - nor is going to. Tiny moments, like islands in the ocean beyond the grey continent of our ordinary days. There, sometimes, you meet your own heart like someone you've never known.
Hans Borli
#77. Nature did not gift us with a mighty Mekong like Thailand and Vietnam, with their vast and naturally fertile plains. Nature instead put our islands ahead of our neighbours in the path of typhoons from the Pacific.
Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo
#78. My goal is to be living back in Canada as soon as I can, hopefully somewhere in the Gulf Islands.
Nicholas Lea
#79. In fact, the Senkaku Islands are ... inherent territory of Japan that is recognized in our history and also by international law.
Naoto Kan
#80. A high jeopardy of extinction comes with territory. Islands are where species go to die.
David Quammen
#81. A global human society, characterised by islands of wealth, surrounded by a sea of poverty, is unsustainable
Thabo Mbeki
#82. In the Caribbean islands, especially in Jamaica, have I found a country similar to South Africa plus the racial freedom I had sought so long.
Peter Abrahams
#83. The Cayman Islands, a British Crown colony in the Caribbean, for instance, is the fifth largest banking center in the world,
Michel Chossudovsky
#84. Islands are havens and breeding grounds for the unique and anomalous. They are natural laboratories of extravagant evolutionary experimentation.
David Quammen
#85. Axiom: you are a sea. Your eye- lids curve over chaos My hands where they touch you, create small inhabited islands soon you will be all earth: a known land, a country.
Margaret Atwood
#86. beast. But first I detour toward the lanai and plop myself on a chaise. The sun is high up in the afternoon sky, not a cloud in sight. People have crowded the beach, just little colorful dots against the white sand. The ocean stretches as far the horizon without any islands visible ahead,
Kendal Taylor
#87. I don't want to go to the Bahamas on holiday. I hate islands. I want to go to Brittany, where it's cold and raining, and there's nothing fancy about it.
Julie Delpy
#88. With my mother's death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.
C.S. Lewis
#89. Our task force put to sea in early January 1942, to attack the Japanese in the Marshall and Gilbert islands, but the mission was called off on the eve of the attack.
Jack Adams
#90. A ship's engine far away on the water expands the summer-night horizon. Both joy and sorrow swell in the dew's magnifying glass. Without really knowing, we divine; our life has a sister ship, following quietly another route. While the sun blazes behind the islands.
Tomas Transtromer
#91. several hundred English lived on Tortuga, the westernmost part of the sprawling British Leeward Islands
Colin Woodard
#92. And for many, politics has become gestural: it is about refusing to engage with power on power's own terms; about action, not ideas; about the symbolic control of territory to create islands of utopia.
Paul Mason
#93. Aside from its parks and nature areas, Singapore is intensively developed, and due to the shortage of land, is building up, down and on manmade islands and landfills.
Alan Huffman
#94. Sometimes, if you want to be happy, you've got to run away to Bath and marry a punk rocker. Sometimes you've got to dye your hair cobalt blue, or wander remote islands in Sicily, or cook your way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year, for no very good reason.
Julie Powell
#95. I thought I might teach philosophy but the atmosphere of a college faculty repelled me; the few islands of greatness seemed to be washed by seas of pettiness and mediocrity.
I. F. Stone
#96. But that is what islands are for; they are places where different destinies can meet and intersect in the full isolation of time.
Lawrence Durrell
#97. I saw for the first time the earth's shape. I could easily see the shores of continents, islands, great rivers, folds of the terrain, large bodies of water. The horizon is dark blue, smoothly turning to black ... the feelings which filled me I can express with one word-joy.
Yuri Gagarin
#98. You laugh as you sing about dying, you drug yourself up, but you can still see clearly, and you die as you break into a fit of laughter, because asi es la vida in this soup of islands stewed in hunger and the desire to be someone else.
Mayra Santos-Febres
#99. Every article on these islands has an almost personal character, which gives this simple life, where all art is unknown, something of the artistic beauty of medieval life.
John Millington Synge
#100. There was nothing but a lonely magnificence of sea and islands
Margaret Craven
