Quotes About Islands

The great writers, Conrad, Maugham and Melville, spent only a few years in the South Seas, but their memory of those waters was indestructible; for the nature of life in the islands commands attention to the vivid world and its even more vivid inhabitants.

In later years, it would become fashionable to say of the missionaries, They came to the islands to do good, and they did right well. Others made jest of the missionary slogan, They came to a nation in darkness; they left it in light, by pointing out: Of course they left Hawaii lighter. They stole every goddamned thing that wasn't nailed down.

The chief character in this narrative is the Caribbean Sea, one of the world's most alluring bodies of water, a rare gem among the oceans, defined by the islands that form a chain of lovely jewels to the north and east.

While the islands were taking their final form, Jesus spoke in Jerusalem and Muhammad came from the blazing deserts with a new vision of heaven, but no men knew the heaven that awaited them on these islands.

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

My uncle was skipper on the old Claymore sailing out from Oban to the Inner Hebrides. My father worked for MacBraynes all his life, on freight boats and then on ferries crossing to Skye, Barra, Uist, the small isles and Iona.

Before the moon I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman's power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon.

You might be able to stage out of Alaska and Hawaii," Burton said. "They're on different grids and probably wouldn't be hit.

The sigh of all the seas breaking in measure round the isles soothed them; the night wrapped them; nothing broke their sleep, until, the birds beginning and the dawn weaving their thin voices in to its whiteness

The fleet would be called the Armada de Molucca, after the Indonesian name for the Spice Islands. The ships were mostly black—pitch black. They derived their blackness, and their ominous aura, from the tar covering the hull

rising approximately 130 feet from the water. A later explorer described the cape as "three great mountains of sand that look like islands

Portugal retained its ambition to wrest control of the spice trade from the Arabs, and to reach the Spice Islands

Qualified sailors were rare in Seville, and qualified sailors willing to risk their lives on a voyage to the Spice Islands rarer still.

Magellan's insistence on a ten-year exclusive on voyages to the Spice Islands appeared preposterous

King Charles dispatched a follow-up expedition to the Spice Islands only six years after Magellan's departure from Spain.

Magellan led his ships in and around the islands of the bay, but found no sign of a strait.

The sea wolves of these two islands are of various colors and of the size and thickness of a calf

This error might have been intentional, to disguise the Spice Islands' location from outsiders

Magellan's expedition to the Spice Islands must not violate the treaty.

A pettos speckled with gold ajiggle with a fremitus from the heart touches me like Athena's hoolet mewing in uncertain dark. So much is nature, whereon we build our particulars fastidious and critical. Your every arrow O Eros has hit me , as the song goes. O girls, girls. This arrow is Timo's curls, this is Heliodora's shoes, this the smell of quinces that blows from Demo's door, flowers plaited into Dorothea's hair and ox-eyed Antikleia's smile that is music from the islands, summer's stars.

What do you talk about to a murderer, and someone you loved, over a perfect dinner and cocktails? I wanted to know so many things, but I couldn't ask any of the real-questions pounding in my head. Instead, we talked of the coming vacation days, a plan for the here and now in the islands.

Collective European Union action could mean no hiding places for evaders, no safe haven for tax avoiders, and no treasure islands for money launderers.

In the child, consciousness rises out of the depths of unconscious psychic life, at first like separate islands, which gradually unite to form a 'continent,' a continuous landmass of consciousness. Progressive mental development means, in effect, extension of consciousness.

There now exists a factor which was formerly lacking - the spirit of the nation has been aroused, and a common misfortune, a common debasement, has united all the inhabitants of the Islands.