Quotes About Islands

I grew up in Hawaii and I think those islands are some of the most amazing places on the planet.

If you look at a map of Europe you will observe that Greece is a skeleton-like hand stretching its crooked fingers out into the Mediterranean Sea.

And in the outer islands she found, I think, a Hawaii more to her liking—not the Babbitty boosters and country-club racists of Honolulu. In snapshots from those jaunts, she looked like a stranger: not Mom but some pensive, stylish lady in a sleeveless turquoise shift, alone with her thoughts in the middle distance—a Joan Didion character, it seems now, walking barefoot, sandals in hand, past a shaggy wall of shorefront pines. Didion, I later learned, was her favorite writer.

From here, to the south and west, one island leads to another, all the way to Frenchboro and Swans Island and Isle au Haut, as this landscape toys with the idea of islands until the sea says enough and there is only water

If Continental tea is like a faded yellow telegraph form, in these islands to the west of Ostend it has the dark, glimmering tones of Russian icons, before the milk gives it a color similar to the complexion of an overfed baby; on the Continent weak tea is served in fragile porcelain, here it is casually poured into thick earthenware cups from battered metal teapots, a heavenly brew to restore the traveler, dirt cheap too.

There remained only rare periods of amorousness that came over the spouses, but they did not last long. These were islands that they would land on temporarily, but then they would put out again to the sea of concealed enmity that expressed itself in estrangement from each other.

Jungle rain had no beginning or end; it grew like foliage from the sky, branching and arching to the earth, sometimes in solid thickets entangling the islands, and other times, in tendrils of blue mist curling out of coastal clouds. The jungle breathed an eternal green that fevered men until they dripped sweat the way rubbery jungle leaves dripped the monsoon rain.

My usual trick with the Irish plays is to set things on islands I've never been to.

When the earthquake hit Haiti in 2010, I was on vacation in the Cayman Islands.

My best vacation was renting a boat and motoring along the Adriatic, going along the Croatian coast, before it became so fashionable. I've also sailed around the Turkish islands, the Greek islands and Sicily.

After the arrival of Europeans, the Big Island's King Kamehameha I rapidly proceeded with the consolidation of the largest islands by purchasing European guns and ships to invade and conquer first Maui and then Oahu.

With the occupation of the Chatham Islands off New Zealand around A.D. 1400, barely a century before European "explorers" entered the Pacific, the task of exploring the Pacific was finally completed by Asians. Their tradition of exploration, lasting tens of thousands of years, had begun when Wiwor's ancestors spread through Indonesia to New Guinea and Australia. It ended only when it had run out of targets and almost every habitable Pacific island had been occupied.

This cousin had a girlfriend with cheekbones to break your heart, and you knew she was the real thing when she steadfastly refused to acknowledge your presence. She possessed secrets—about islands, about horses, about French pronunciation—that you would never know.

But you don't know the world,' I teased her. 'No, only here, and Jamaica of course, Coulibri, Spanish Town. I don't know the other islands at all. Is the world more beautiful, then?' And how to answer that? 'It's different,' I said.

Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.

The north coast of Brittany is eaten into bays from which the sea retreats to considerable distances, and is fringed with reefs and islands. It is a favourite resort of Parisians throughout its stretch, from Dinard to Plestin.

I'm not a wide-eyed imperialist who wants to see Americans manning outposts all over the world. Not outposts to freedom in the cold war cliche, but islands of stability and seas of ethnic strife. That is not what anyone should feel comfortable seeing Americans doing.

Fiji had experienced the ordeal of two military coups.

Those who claim to be in the know say Baros is nothing out of the ordinary as Maldivian islands go - that Reethi Ra is far more fashionable, Soneva Fushi more eco-compliant. Truth to tell, they all look pretty much alike from a distance.

Kuun noustessa punaiset hämähäkit pariutuvat asumattomilla luodoilla, koko kallio on yhtä ja samaa tiuhaa hämähäkkimattoa, jossa vilisee pieniä, hurmioituneita olioita.

They would emerge a short distance away, sometimes three or four of them, a short lived archipelago of volcanic islands.

Less welcome to the people of Paneron is the STIFLER, a humid wind that brings the allergenic pollen of carp-weed bushes from nearby unpopulated islands.

We ride over the cliffs and then the sea, watching mermaids leap in the spangled waves and selkies rolling along the surf. Past the fog perpetually surrounding the islands and concealing them from mortals.

More varied than any landscape was the landscape in the sky, with islands of gold and silver, peninsulas of apricot and rose against a background of many shades of turquoise and azure.