The Island Quotes

#1. The grief of the keen is no personal complaint for the death of one woman over eighty years, but seems to contain the whole passionate rage that lurks somewhere in every native of the island.

John Millington Synge

#2. The Castro government is disproportionately white given the color of the island. It doesn't look like Cuba.

Mark Falcoff

#3. Why do I suddenly feel like I'm on the Island of Misfit Toys?

Allison Pang

#4. A momentous but until then overlooked fact was making itself apparent: I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the island. It

Alain De Botton

#5. Why slum it where people were burdened by yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that? By history? Here, on the Island, they had learnt how to deal with history, how to sling it carelessly on your back and stride out across the download with the breeze in your face.

Julian Barnes

#6. You know, I'm a modern day Harry Belafonte; I got the swagger of the island.

Wyclef Jean

#7. As I told thee before, I am subject to a tyrant,
A sorcerer, that by his cunning hath
Cheated me of the island,
----Caliban
(Act III, scene II, lines 40-43)

William Shakespeare

#8. It's this place. Whatever darkness came to the island, it's here to stay. Stick around long enough and it gets inside your skin, into your cells, like an infection.

Hunter Shea

#9. Life is an island. People come out of the sea, cross the island, and return to the sea. But this short life is long and beautiful. In getting to know nature man exalts the wonder and beauty of life.

Martiros Saryan

#10. Wet, wet, the interior of the island, they said, bog and marsh, rivers and chains of ponds alive with metal-throated birds. The ships scraped on around the points. And the lookout saw shapes of caribou folding into fog.

Annie Proulx

#11. The general knowledge of time on the island depends, curiously enough, on the direction of the wind.

John Millington Synge

#12. Look," I said. "Me and the island are . . . kind of partners." "Oh, right," Thomas said. He looked at Karrin and said, "Harry's a geosexual.

Jim Butcher

#13. Sourmelina's secret (as Aunt Zo put it): 'Lina was one of those women they named the island after.

Jeffrey Eugenides

#14. Throughout the island they wear the same sort of clothes, without any other distinction except what is necessary to distinguish the two sexes and the married and unmarried.

Thomas More

#15. I go to Queens for queens to get the crew from Brooklyn,
Make money in Manhattan and never been tooken.
Go Uptown and the Bronx to boogie down,
Get strong on the Island, recoup, and lay around.

Rakim

#16. Mrs. Brown, whose primary job on the island

Pat Conroy

#17. But already this isn't quite right. The first apartment I had wasn't on the island at all. It was in Brooklyn Heights, a few blocks away from where I would have been living in the alternate reality of accomplished love, the ghostly other life that haunted me for almost two full years.

Olivia Laing

#18. The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.

Huston Smith

#19. The Romans held Britain from the invasion of Julius Caesar till their voluntary withdrawal from the island, A.D. 420,- that is, about five hundred years.

Thomas Bulfinch

#20. In mysteries what we know, and our realization of what we do not know, proceed together; the larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder. It is like the quantum world, where the more we understand its formalism, the stranger that world becomes.

Huston Smith

#21. I would not be cured if the price of the cure was that I must leave the island and give up my work I am perfectly resigned to my lot. Do not feel sorry for me.

Father Damien

#22. I'd never forget how it felt to say those words. To be in our place. In love with you, in love with us, in love with our secret, with the island we were building, keeping out the whole wide world. There with you, I was ... safe.

Lauren Blakely

#23. Younger Cuban Americans who have decided to go to the island always come back telling me "that isn't the country my grandparents have told me about."

Mark Falcoff

#24. In the night, I've shrunk and everyone else on the island has grown. They're all nine feet tall and men and I'm four feet and a child. Dove, too, is a toy or possibly a dog as I lead her through the throngs of people.

Maggie Stiefvater

#25. Sometime we will have to stop overevaluating the word. We shall learn to realize that it is only one of the many bridges that connect the island of our soul with the great continent of common life ... the broadest, perhaps, but in no way the most refined.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#26. A silvery voice chimed, Today a Sun Dragoness is born, first of her kind. Welcome to the Island-World, Riika. The stars sing with you. She is born! Rising,

Marc Secchia

#27. I have been taking my daily walk round the island, and visited the sugar mill and the threshing mill again.

Fanny Kemble

#28. Love is the only boat we can ride in to reach the island of happiness.

Debasish Mridha

#29. The color of the land fades gradually from dark jungle green to pale green and then a sere reddish-brown as the tail extends from the fat center of the island out to the end, and the soil becomes dryer.

Neal Stephenson

#30. Bali is one of my favorite places in the world. In one of my past lives, I believe I was living on the island of Bali.

Chip Conley

#31. Jessica, of course, who feels no human emotions, forgets that her whole family was about to be massacred and is already thinking about the men she will attract on the island.

Robin Hardwick

#32. The island of Bali is littered with prayers. Sacred words, yes, but also sacred objects.

Jeremy Grimshaw

#33. Hy gododin catann hue Hud a lledrith mal wyddan Gaunce ae bellawn wen cabri Varigal don Fincayra Dravia, dravia Fincayra (Talking trees and walking stones, Giants aare the island's bones. While this land our dance still knows, Varigal crowns Fincayra. Live long, live long Fincayra.

T.A. Barron

#34. Olivia imagined a D-day-style invasion of the island, gardeners with saws and shovels parachuting out of the sky and storming the beaches - and were being liberated from the thorny or flowery embrace of climbing vines, deratted, reroofed, fixed up, and condoized. Her apartment

Neal Stephenson

#35. Often it's just a short swim from the shipwreck of your life to the island paradise of your dreams, assuming you don't drown in the metaphor.

Robert Breault

#36. I was born in the island of Ireland. I have Irish traits in me - we don't all have the traits of what came from Scotland, there is the celtic factor ... and I am an Irishman because you cannot be an Ulsterman without being an Irishman

Ian Paisley

#37. A single glance at the map will make the reader acquainted with the position of the eastern coast of the island of Great Britain, as connected with the shores of the opposite continent.

James F. Cooper

#38. I grew up on the island, Trinidad to be exact, and I never thought it would be possible. These sort of things happen once in a lifetime. I just know God is bigger than me and everything I do is to serve and please Him.

Heather Headley

#39. He knew too what it was to live through a hurricane with the other people of the island and the bond that the hurricane made between all people who had been through it. He also knew that hurricanes could be so bad that nothing could live through them.

Ernest Hemingway,

#40. The island of the tonal, the way we see life, is there so we can get through our life. It was never intended to become a dictator that would usurp all other views of the world and banish them.

Frederick Lenz

#41. The island is ours. Here, in some way, we are young forever.

E. Lockhart

#42. The truth is, until you know any different, the island is enough.
Actually, I know different. And it's still enough.

Maggie Stiefvater

#43. I live in a house over there on the Island, and in that house there is a man waiting for me. When he drove up at the door I drove out of the dock because he says I'm his ideal.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#44. The anti-apartheid prisoners on the island, like so many in every age and nation, found that Shakespeare had a peculiar ability to gentle their condition. They used to gather clandestinely to read the plays; on one occasion, the book was passed around for each man to mark his favourite lines.

Daniel Hannan

#45. The racket reverberates down the second staircase and spills out into the kitchen, and the two screeching, running kids who are making it do laps around the island like a fucked-up Hunger Games version of ring-around-the-rosy.

Emma Chase

#46. I first saw the island of Noirmoutier when I was two weeks old. I think it's probably safe to say that I didn't fully appreciate it at the time; but I grew to love it as year after year I spent holidays there at my grandparents' cottage.

Joanne Harris

#47. 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

#48. I've been to Sardinia about 10 times because my wife, my daughter and I used to go every year with another family. We rented the same house each time in Villasimius in the southern part of the island, and always went to the same two beaches and same three restaurants.

Rick Astley

#49. 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

#50. It was then I thought of Corsica, the place we had discovered together. I craved the wind, the sun and salt, the simplicity of the island.

Lucy Foley

#51. Later the island was turned into a leper colony, a lunatic asylum, and a naval base. The government had only recently turned the island back into a prison.

Nelson Mandela

#52. In putting setting to work, I like to think about long shots and close-ups. The long shot is the overall view of the place in which the characters live - the island, the town, the wide sweep of place. Then we narrow in. The close-up, the tight focus, makes the place different from anywhere else.

Kaui Hart Hemmings

#53. All our science and philosophy form only an island of knowledge surrounded by an ocean of mystery. The larger the island grows, the longer the shoreline where the known meets the unknown.

Ralph Washington Sockman

#54. The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#55. 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

#56. The island is in Kenya, the water is in Uganda ... But the [Luos, a Kenyan ethnic group] are mad, they want to fish here but this is Uganda.

Yoweri Museveni

#57. You might have mentioned this to me Molly," said Leonard. "The fact that there are hostile natives on the island."
"I forgot," said Molly.
"You forgot?" said Leonard.
"There's been a lot happening," said Molly.

Dave Barry

#58. That shoreline where the island of knowing meets the unfathomable sea of our own being is the landscape of myth.

William Irwin Thompson

#59. Caliban: As I told thee before, I am subject to a tyrant, a sorcerer that by his cunning hath cheated me of the island.

William Shakespeare

#60. As I experienced life on the island, without electricity, plumbing or telephone, I thought it was important to show that people can live as I did without dying or falling apart. I wanted people to understand that we don't need everything that our culture tells us we have to have to be satisfied.

Alix Kates Shulman

#61. I anticipate with joy the approaching period when the stigmas of poverty and pride so liberally bestowed on the highlanders by our southern gentry will be as inapplicable to the inhabitants of that country as of any in the island.

James Hogg

#62. The baby's eyes were dark, almost black, and when I nursed her in the middle of the night, she'd stare at me with a stunned, shipwrecked look as if my body were the island she'd washed up on.

Jenny Offill

#63. A glassy calm replaced the storm surrounding their boat.
The distant thunder struck a note, white-hot and remote.
An invisible magnet seemed to steer their course.
The island pulled them in with its dreamy force.

J.Z. Bingham

#64. He hoped it would snow recklessly and bring to the island the impossible winter purity, so rare and precious, he remembered fondly from his youth.

David Guterson

#65. The optimist lives on the peninsula of infinite possibilities; the pessimist is stranded on the island of perpetual indecision.

William Arthur Ward

#66. From when she was a baby, Tom has taught the girl to respect, but not fear, the forces of nature- the lightning that might strike the light tower on Janus, the oceans that batter the island.

M.L. Stedman

#67. A refreshing west coast breeze carried a few clouds toward the main door of the car shop by the ocean's rocky beach on the island.

J.M.K. Walkow

#68. Or she may find out what is at the end of the harbor road ... that wandering, twisting road like a nice red snake, that leads, so Elizabeth thinks, to the end of the world. Perhaps the Island of Happiness is there.

L.M. Montgomery

#69. I pray the Pope Francis can use his moral authority to inspire true religious freedom, and bring us closer to the day when freedom can finally take root on the island country; because only then will the people of Cuba prosper and have the opportunity to live out God's plan.

Marco Rubio

#70. Lightning flashed around the island; thunder played its favorite game of scaring the crap out of all the shivering mortals on the earth below.

Pat Conroy

#71. Travelers describe a tree in the island of Java whose pestiferous exhalations blight every tiny blade of grass within the compass of its shade. So it is with despotism.

Giovanni Ruffini

#72. I'm a trumpet player, so I always carry a pocket trumpet in case there's an opportunity to jam with the locals. I was in Guadeloupe last year filming 'Death in Paradise,' and I played all over the island and had the best time.

Colin Salmon

#73. After a war of about 40 years, undertaken by the most stupid [Claudius], maintained by the most dissolute [Nero], and terminated by the most timid [Domitian] of all the emperors, the far greater part of the island [of Britain] submitted to the Roman yoke.

Edward Gibbon

#74. Below me Rontu was running along the cliffs barking at the screaming gulls. Pelicans were chattering as they finished the blue water. But suddenly I thought of Tutok, and the island seemed very quiet.

Scott O'Dell

#75. For four hundred years the blacks of Haiti had yearned for peace. for three hundred years the island was spoken of as a paradise of riches and pleasures, but that was in reference to the whites to whom the spirit of the land gave welcome. Haiti has meant split blood and tears for blacks.

Zora Neale Hurston

#76. By God, master," said Sancho, "the island that I cannot govern with the years I have, I'll not be able to govern with the years of Methuselah; the difficulty is that the said island keeps its distance somewhere, I know not where; and not that there is any want of head in me to govern it.

Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

#77. Why leave a country when you're on top? Whether it was another communist scare or the even greener pastures in America, no one ever gives me a straight answer. (The only thing anyone can agree on is that they still miss the island.)

Eddie Huang

#78. The oceans never stop. They know no beginning or end. The wind never finishes. Sometimes it disappears, but only to gather momentum from somewhere else, returning to fling itself at the island, to make a point which is lost on Tom.

M.L. Stedman

#79. From Arawaks he later met on Hispaniola (the island of the Dominican Republic and Haiti) he learned of other people to the south, whom the Spanish called the Cariba or Caniba, from which we get the words "Caribbean" and "cannibal.

Lincoln Paine

#80. I loved mornings on the island. Fucking loved them. Emphasis on fucking.

Shay Savage

#81. We are the Island of Misfit Toys, all broken or smashed in some way.

Corrine Jackson

#82. Was born into a middle-class Tamil family in the island town of Rameswaram in the erstwhile Madras state.

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

#83. Stood off and on during the night, determining not to come to anchor till morning, fearing to meet with shoals; continued our course in the morning; and as the island was found to be six or seven leagues distant, and the tide was against us, it was noon when we arrived there.

Christopher Columbus

#84. Practice any faith you wish. Got a ball field up the island where you can practice. I'll give the Deity a fast one high and inside if he crowds the plate.

Ernest Hemingway,

#85. Laugh at the night, at the day, at the moon, laugh at the twisted streets of the island, laugh at this clumsy boy who loves you, but when I open my eyes and close them, when my steps go, when my steps return, deny me bread, air, light, spring, but never your laughter for I would die.

Pablo Neruda

#86. When you sit, you've put a place on the island of the tonal for the possibility of your thoughts stopping for a short period of time.

Frederick Lenz

#87. Granana lives on the other side of the island. She's eighty-four, I'm twelve, and Wallow's fourteen, so it's a little ambiguous as to who's babysitting whom.

Karen Russell

#88. I don't believe environment has the slightest bit to do with anything - I only believe in ancestral influence. It would have made no difference whether I'd been brought up in a reform school, or on the island of Lesbos.

Preston Sturges

#89. What you see is what you get. The island is imaginative enough. Creativity don't need to be wasted on naming things.

Doug Cooper

#90. Do you ever think you might be a different species of human, knitted out of raw DNA in a laboratory like in The Island of Doctor Moreau, and then turned loose to see if you can pass yourself off as normal or not?

David Mitchell

#91. The most famous of them all was the overthrow of the island of Atlantis.

Plato

#92. The island had come to seem one of those places seen from the train that belong to a life in which we shall never take part.

Arthur Ransome

#93. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.

Jack Gilbert

#94. Take what happened to me in Bali. I planned on going to Ubud, then met a man on an airplane who told me it was too touristy. He gave me an address on the other side of the island, which turned out to be a palace where I lived for four years.

Rita Gelman

#95. It wouldn't do for the owner of the Gansett Island Ferry Company to be seen falling down drunk at the island's landmark hotel. He knew that,

Marie Force

#96. Mafia landmarks are found everywhere in beautiful Sicily, an unfortunate byproduct of the island's tragic history. By mapping theses strange sites and telling the amazing stories behind them, I hope to remind readers that the Mafia is not a romantic relic of the past.

Carl Russo

#97. If you want to take the island, then burn your boats. With absolute commitment come the insights that create real victory.

Tony Robbins

#98. Drinking also maroons you without provisions on the island of self. Like most other promises it makes, alcohol's vow of kinship, that it will bridge your life to others, smooth the way, proves false. Fooled again: you're alone.

James Sallis

#99. That strange turbulence that rises when you begin to wash up on the island of your own little self and you don't see how you could ever sustain yourself there.

Sue Monk Kidd

#100. And I'll gaze across the chasm to the other side of the island, where I can still sometimes catch sight of a curly-haired urchin running joyously through the tall purple grass, her faithful dog at her heels.

Michelle Cooper