Small Island Quotes

#1. I'm Canadian - I came from a small island off Vancouver. I moved to Vancouver and a couple months later moved to Los Angeles for work. It was very adventurous. It was kind of scary - I didn't know anybody.

Shaun Sipos

#2. For a small island, the place is remarkably diverse. Writers tend to see things from their own points of view, looking in one direction very much.

William Golding

#3. Because I am so intensely identified with opinion and analysis and contextualization, I think I just need, for my own psychological benefit, a small island in which I can stand and say, 'I'm going to sit this one out.'

Keith Olbermann

#4. Well managed and healthy oceans are vital to the survival of small island states, such as the Maldives. This important book shows how scientists and governments can better protect the world's oceans.

Mohamed Nasheed

#5. Princeton isn't actually part of New Jersey. It's a small island of wealth and intellectual eccentricity floating in the Sea of Central Megalopolis. It's an honest-to-god town awash in the land of the strip mall. Hair is smaller, heels are shorter, asses are tighter in Princeton.

Janet Evanovich

#6. I gladly accepted the commission but was uncertain about what the end result would be. On the one hand, Cuban music was conquering the world; being heard everywhere, and our small island was already producing one of the popular musical genres of the 20th century.

Alejo Carpentier

#7. It's a tough life being a pop star. You know, at the end of the day when you've paid all the bills and put the kids through college and that, you know, there's only enough left for a small island off the South Pacific.

Larry Mullen

#8. It's funny, but we were living on this small island off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina when I was 9.

Josh Lucas

#9. He created reality around himself, bringing order and peace to a small island of warm firelight and the simple smell of hearth bread cooking.

Robin Hobb

#10. I'm stuck somewhere a small island in the middle of the Atlantic where I'm alone. Because in France, they're like, 'No, you're not like us, you're not a French guy.' And in America, they're like, 'You're not like us.' I'm really alone in my little thing.

Louis Leterrier

#11. Privacy is a rare commodity on a small island and secrets weigh heavy on their keepers

Christopher Moore

#12. You have 60 countries in the world with a terrorist problem. That's two-thirds of the world. We have this group in Basilan, which is a small island in the far south of the Philippines, and the island itself has a population of - what? - 300,000.

Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo

#13. Boredom can be a lethal thing on a small island.

Christopher Moore

#14. A small island with a big ego may see itself as a giant continent! A giant continent with a big diffidence may see itself as a small island! But in the end small is small and big is big!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#15. There's a small island, inhabited in the South Pacific that I will try to swim to.

Peter Arnett

#16. One of the most magical places on Earth is a small island in the Caribbean called Mustique. With brilliant beaches, warm water, and lush vegetation, this tiny green swath of land is my idea of paradise.

Nina Garcia

#17. My wife's brother has a little house on a small island in the Baltic Sea, and we go there at Christmas. The 30-minute crossing from the mainland to this island is the most terrifying cruise you'll ever take. They give you a barf bag when you walk on board.

Nick Frost

#18. Getting to do what I think was my fifth BBC drama with Nikki Amuka-Bird - we've done 'Shoot The Messenger,' 'Five Days,' 'The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency,' 'Born Equal' and now 'Small Island' - was another highlight for me. And filming in Jamaica was great, too.

David Oyelowo

#19. We may be a small island, but we are not a small people.

Edward Heath

#20. 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

#21. The city is like poetry; it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines.

E.B. White

#22. I come from the small island of Antigua and I always wanted to write; I just didn't know that it was possible.

Jamaica Kincaid

#23. The people in ships, however, took an equally singular view of England. Not only did it appear to them to be an island, and a very small island, but it was a shrinking island in which people were imprisoned.

Virginia Woolf

#24. For a small island [Great Britain], the place is remarkably diverse.

William Golding

#25. Do you know," he said, "it's twenty years since you wrote Notes from a Small Island?" (This was my first book about Britain. It did awfully well there.) "Twenty years?" I replied, amazed at how much past one can accumulate without any effort at all.

Bill Bryson

#26. For me when I was growing up, some of the happiest times were when we went to a small island called Nantucket off Massachusetts.

Gwyneth Paltrow

#27. Till now, madness has been thought a small island in an ocean of sanity. I am beginning to suspect that it is not an island at all but a continent.

Machado De Assis

#28. Beyond the borders of wealthy countries like the United States, in developing countries where most people in the world live, the impacts of climate change are much more deadly, from the growing desertification of Africa to the threats of rising sea levels and the submersion of small island nations.

Amy Goodman

#29. Sri Lanka is a small island, and the war affected everybody. Everybody knew somebody who was killing or being killed.

Ru Freeman

#30. John spent the morning rebuilding his SOS sign on the beach. He says that he saw a commercial airliner pass over. I'm not sure if the trying circumstances have made him delusional, or if the plane was too high to see his small sign. I think he saw what he wanted to see.

Jennifer Arnett

#31. His voice was oddly and beautifully rough-cut, as some small boys' voices are. Each of his phrasings was rather like a little ancient island, inundated by a miniature sea of whiskey.

J.D. Salinger

#32. 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

#33. There are no bears on the island."
"Really, are you sure because I was hiking with my Dad and I'm sure I saw one? Either that or it was a humongous man-eating badger, with fangs. It might have been frothing at the mouth."
"Man-eating, huh? No problem then. I'm a girl.

Tracy Brogan

#34. In their price range on Alice Island, all the houses are starter homes, though A.J. feels like he is past the starter home age of his life. Weird kitchens and floorplans, too-small rooms, ominous references to foundation issues.

Gabrielle Zevin

#35. Mr. Tiny nodded, then started forward. Enough of the chitchat, boys. I have work to do and I must be quick. Time is precious. A volcano's due to erupt on a small tropical island tomorrow. Everybody within a ten-mile radius will be roasted alive. I want to be there
it sounds like great fun.

Darren Shan

#36. When I started off as an actress, I did at a play at the Taper Too Theatre here in Los Angeles, called 'In The Abyss Of Coney Island.' That was more of a dramatic play. It was a small theater house. This was the first time I was literally on the road, doing a play, for four months.

Vivica A. Fox

#37. 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

#38. Though the island of Great Britain exhibits but a small spot upon the map of the globe, it makes a splendid appearance in the history of mankind, and for a long space has been signally under the protection of God and a seat of peace, liberty and truth.

John Newton

#39. As they drove back to Greenpoint from Long Island, Drake looked at the other drivers on the Long Island Expressway and realized that anyone could be anyone's father, that anyone could love anyone under certain circumstances, and that life is a museum of small accidents.

Simon Van Booy

#40. We live on a minute island of known things. Our undiminished wonder at the mystery which surrounds us is what makes us human. In science fiction we can approach that mystery, not in small, everyday symbols, but in bigger ones of space and time.

Damon Knight

#41. Steller's sea cow, named after the German naturalist Georg Steller, who discovered a small community of them living on Bering Island, off the coat of Siberia, in 1741. Hunted mercilessly by humans, within thirty years of its discovery by Steller this remarkable species was extinct.

Bill Bryson

#42. In the bare room under the old library on the hill in the town at the tip of the small peninsula on the cold island so far from everything else, I lived among strangers and birds.

Rebecca Solnit

#43. The rain, which had continued yesterday and last night, ceased this morning. We then proceeded, and after passing two small islands about ten miles further, stopped for the night at Piper's landing, opposite another island.

Meriwether Lewis

#44. It's a small closet."...
"It's a walk-in the size of Rhode Island," he teased...
"Isn't that just like a man to exaggerate the size of something?

Avery Flynn

#45. Sundown. The distressed sloop, its mainmast shattered by lightning, its sails ripped by the winds of the open sea, drifted into the small, quiet beach of a private island in the Lesser Antilles

Robert Ludlum

#46. I like to read in the bathtub. Ideally, that bathtub would be located on a small Greek island.

Adam Mansbach

#47. It looked as though [the stars] were breathing to some never-ending slow, deep rhythm. They breathed & watched as the world came & went. ...For them, the earth was one more island world in the immeasurable ocean of outer space, its inhabitants microscopically small

Nina George

#48. 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

#49. I looked around the tiny bathroom, at the three of us crammed in. A billionaire, a movie star, and a small town girl. It was some sick lesbian twist on Gilligan's Island. I would have laughed but none of it was funny.

Giselle Fox

#50. We moved around a bit when I was younger, but I grew up primarily in Rhode Island, in a beautiful seaside community called East Greenwich. It was a small town, and so safe that we rarely locked our doors at night.

Michelle Gagnon

#51. Nat was so easy about these things. Alex guessed that's what happened when you slept with another girl every week on an overcrowded island with too small a surface. She had no choice but to practice casualness.

Harper Bliss

#52. Pair of Stephens Island wrens, which were found only on a small, isolated island in New Zealand's Cook Strait. All were killed by a lighthouse keeper's cat.

Bill Bryson

#53. 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

#54. I grew up close to Melbourne, about two hours outside, on Phillip Island. It's really small; it's kind of a little summer beach town.

Liam Hemsworth

#55. Ireland is a small but insuppressible island half an hour nearer the sunset than Great Britain.

Tom Kettle

#56. Yeah? Rock 'n' Roll is fast, you know. If all goes according to plan I could be in rehab next thursday. Tuesday week I'll be living on an island with a small Indian boy.

Noel Fielding

#57. I was a small kid from Huntington, Long Island. I never imagined that anything like that would happen to me.

Gerry Cooney

#58. This is only a small part of the totality. From this island earth we see only a fragment of creation and its knowledge.

Frederick Lenz

#59. When I looked at a map in town, Rhode Island seemed lost up there in the corner. A state so small and crowded, there didn't seem to be room for a person at all.

Michelle Hoover

#60. Beetles and butterflies are sometimes restricted to small areas. Each mountain in a range, and even the different zones of a mountain, may have its own peculiar species. But the house-fly seems to be everywhere. I wonder if any island in mid-ocean is flyless.

John Muir

#61. 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