Quotes About Islands

Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches.

Greece is internationally famous for three reasons. First it has more islands than people. Second, it used to be a part of Turkey. Third, its national hero, Alexander the Great, was a Yugoslavian.

Our history is our own; it's not America's. Too often, those who campaign against racial inequality import wholesale a narrative and assumptions that have nothing to do with this country's history and have no place on these islands.

Effectively, what we are saying to the governments of Europe is, 'OK, after 300 years, you have left these islands in a pretty bad state. You've left them with terrible developmental challenges, and we believe you have a responsibility to return to the Caribbean and participate in the rebuilding of the Caribbean.'

The Senkaku Islands are an integral part of Japanese territory based on international law as well as in the context of our history.

In fact, the Senkaku Islands are... inherent territory of Japan that is recognized in our history and also by international law.

Now they emerged upon a great prairie, an expanse of rumpled short-grass plains with occasional clumps of trees dimly seen in the distance, like tiny islands in a sea. This was the western border of a scattered belt of forest land, about forty miles in width, which stretched across the country from north to south, from the Arkansas to the Red River. This oddly fashioned landscape was called the Cross Timbers.

Of all the islands he'd visited, two stood out. The island of the past, he said, where the only time was past time and the inhabitants were bored and more or less happy, but where the weight of illusion was so great that the island sank a little deeper into the river every day. And the island of the future, where the only time was the future, and the inhabitants were planners and strivers, such strivers, said Ulises, that they were likely to end up devouring one another.

One learns from the sea how little one needs, not how much. These were our islands now, islands cut off from the world of concrete and steel, from freeways and television

learns from the sea how little one needs, not how much. These were our islands now, islands cut off from the world of concrete and steel, from freeways and television

The subject of Cahier is the cultural dislocation of a French-educated Black man from the islands. The poet finds himself between two worlds, belonging completely to neither, and the poem is the record of his struggle to recover his native identity.

And Kotick curled up his mustache (it was a beauty) and said, I am the only white seal that has ever been born on the beaches, and I am the only seal, black or white, who ever thought of looking for new islands.

Maybe unhappiness is the continuum through which a human life moves, and joy just a series of blips, of islands in the stream.

Le bonheur est comme ces palais des îles enchantées dont les dragons gardent les portes. Il faut combattre pour le conquérir, et moi, en vérité, je ne sais en quoi j'ai mérité le bonheur d'être le mari de Mercédès.

And the boat and the dock and the gravel on the shore, the trees sky-pointed or crouching, leaning out over the water, the complicated profile of surrounding islands and dim yet distinct mountains, seemed to exist in a natural confusion, more extravagant and yet more ordinary than anything I could dream or invent. Like a place that will go on existing whether you are there or not, and that in fact is still there.

But here, in the tide country, transformation is the rule of life: rivers stray from week to week, and islands are made and unmade in days. In other places forests take centuries, even millennia, to regenerate; but mangroves can recolonize a denuded island in ten to fifteen years. Could it be the very rhythms of the earth were quickened here so that they unfolded at an accelerated pace?

Metaphorically these essays move as a quiet but observant coast-guard cutter among the rocks and islands up and down the littoral of our life.

The beginning of the end, the irreversible separation of the mainland of truth into islands of seperate realities, came with the Western attacks on Afganistan following 9/11.

They cross the Channel at midnight. There are twelve and they are named for songs: Stardust and Stormy Weather and In the Mood and Pistol-Packin' Mama. The sea glides along far below, spattered with the countless chevrons of whitecaps. Soon enough, the navigators can discern the low moonlit lumps of islands ranged along the horizon.

I have a home in Puerto Rico, and I see what is happening on the islands there.

My Stuyvesant students were not satisfied. Why was I telling them stories of women from the Islands and Puerto Ricans and Greeks when the world was going to hell? Because the women from the Islands believe in education. You can demonstrate and shake your fists, burn your draft cards and block the traffic with your bodies, but what do you know in the end? For the ladies from the Islands there is one relevance, education. That is all they know. That is all I know. That is all I need to know.

Climate change knows no borders. It will not stop before the Pacific islands and the whole of the international community here has to shoulder a responsibility to bring about a sustainable development.

The Galapagos Islands provide a window on time. In a geologic sense, the islands are young, yet they appear ancient.

Islands of memory begin to rise above the river of his life. At first they are little uncharted islands, rocks just peeping above the surface of the waters. Round about them and behind in the twilight of the dawn stretches the great untroubled sheet of water; then new islands, touched to gold by the sun.