Island Quotes

1. "We, in Prince Edward Island, are fully familiar with this modern phenomenon."
Author: Alex Campbell

2. "As a kid, I did some running but especially loved biking and swimming. I grew up on Long Island, and our mom took us all the time to the ocean, so I grew up doing open-water swimming in the Atlantic."
Author: Alice Dreger

3. "Yet the very name Ganga-Sagar, joining, as it did, river and sea, clear and dark, known and hidden, served to remind the migrants of the yawning chasm ahead; it was as if they were sitting balanced on the edge of a precipice, and the island were an outstretched limb of sacred Jambudvipa, their homeland, reaching out to keep them from tumbling into the void."
Author: Amitav Ghosh

4. "Lighthouses don't go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining."
Author: Anne Lamott

5. "Tourism is a crucial industry that could employ millions of Filipinos, skilled and unskilled alike, cross those 7,107 islands of the Philippines. From the current projection of 3.3 million tourist arrivals in 2010, our aim is to eventually attract 6 million tourists. In the process, we expect to create 3 million jobs in the next six years."
Author: Benigno Aquino III

6. "In my front yard, there are these two giant old trees, which help the porch vibe, obviously, with a forty-foot-tall canopy. It has a very Jurassic Parky vibe, but without dinosaurs. Also, most people on my street are friendly, and I don't live on an island."
Author: Chad Eastham

7. "I watched the people passing below, each of them a story, each story part of somebody else's, all of it connected to the big story of the world. People weren't islands, so far as I was concerned. How could they be, when their stories kept getting tangled up in everybody else's?"
Author: Charles De Lint

8. "But it doesn't happen that way, I keep telling myself knowingly and sadly. Only in our fraternity pledges and masonic inductions, our cowboy movies and magazine stories, not in our real-life lives. For, the seventeenth-century humanist to the contrary, each man is an island complete unto himself, and as he sinks, the moving feet go on around him, from nowhere to nowhere and with no time to lose. The world is long past the Boy Scout stage of its development; now each man dies as he was meant to die, and as he was born, and as he lived: alone, all alone. Without any God, without any hope, without any record to show for his life.("New York Blues")"
Author: Cornell Woolrich

9. "Back then life was simple and sweet. Everything was simple and sweet. The taste of cherries, the cool shade, the fresh smell of the river. That was how we lived, in a vale among the hills, sheltered from the storms. Ignorant of the world, as though on an island. And then. Then everything changed."
Author: Cyril Pedrosa

10. "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."
Author: David Guterson

11. "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."
Author: David Oyelowo

12. "No man is an island. No man stands alone."
Author: Dennis Brown

13. "You're an island no matter what you do. I think it's very dangerous to use popularity as your identity in life. So you have to really know who you are inside, the core person, and follow what is true rather than follow what is hype."
Author: Donny Osmond

14. "Fiordland, a vast tract of mountainous terrain that occupies the south-west corner of South Island, New Zealand, is one of the most astounding pieces of land anywhere on God's earth, and one's first impulse, standing on a cliff top surveying it all, is simply to burst into spontaneous applause."
Author: Douglas Adams

15. "England was alive, throbbing through all her estuaries, crying for joy through the mouths of all her gulls, and the north wind, with contrary motion, blew stronger against her rising seas. What did it mean? For what end are her fair complexities, her changes of soil, her sinuous coast? Does she belong to those who have moulded her and made her feared by other lands, or to those who have added nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing as a ship of souls, with all the brave world's fleet accompanying her towards eternity?"
Author: E.M. Forster

16. "Dreams were the worst. Of course I dreamed of foodand love, but they were pleasant rather than otherwise. But then I'd dream of thingslike slitting a baby's throat, mistaking itfor a baby goat. I'd havenightmares of other islandsstretching away from mine, infinitiesof islands, islands spawning islands,like frogs' eggs turning into polliwogsof islands, knowing that I had to liveon each and every one, eventually,for ages, registering their flora,their fauna, their geography."
Author: Elizabeth Bishop

17. "Just before it was dark, as they passed a great island of Sargasso weed that heaved and swung in the light sea as though the ocean were making love with something under a yellow blanket, his small line was taken by a dolphin. He saw it first when it jumped in the air, true gold in the last of the sun and bending and flapping wildly in the air."
Author: Ernest Hemingway

18. "The wise man makes an island of himself that no flood can overwhelm."
Author: Gautama Buddha

19. "Mathematics catalogues everything that is not self-contradictory; within that vast inventory, physics is an island of structures rich enough to contain their own beholders."
Author: Greg Egan

20. "Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are."
Author: Herman Melville

21. "I'm off to an island nation where formal wear consists of a leaf tired around a penis."
Author: J. Maarten Troost

22. "Our task force put to sea in early January 1942, to attack the Japanese in the Marshall and Gilbert islands, but the mission was called off on the eve of the attack."
Author: Jack Adams

23. "I had traveled eight thousand miles around the American continent and I was back on Times Square; and right in the middle of a rush hour, too, seeing with my innocent road-eyes the absolute madness and fantastic hoorair of New York with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves, the mad dream-grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying, just so they could be buried in those awful cemetery cities beyond Long Island City."
Author: Jack Kerouac

24. "As they prepared themselves to go ashore no one doubted in theory that at least a certain percentage of them would remain on the island dead, once they set foot on it. But no one expected to be one of these. Still it was an awesome thought and as the first contingents came struggling up on deck in full gear to form up, all eyes instinctively sought out immediately this island where they were to be put, and left, and which might possibly turn out to be a friend's grave."
Author: James Jones

25. "But there were other great writers who had done all these things. What set Shakespeare apart...even from other greats, was his generosity: his invitation, even insistence,for others to join him in the act of imagining...His reticence [to add stage directions] made his works wonderfully elastic. It also made them demnding--sometimes maddeningly so--for directors and actors who had to figure out at every turn why these words and no others needed to be said right here and now. But Shakespeare was also demanding of his audiences: 'Yes,' you could almost hear him say, 'you are sitting in a fairly barren wooden theater. But dream yourselves to France. To a seacoast in Bohemia. To a magic-haunted island in a tempest-tossed sea. I dare you.' -Kate Stanley"
Author: Jennifer Lee Carrell

26. "Leis go brown, tectonic plates shift, deep currents move, islands vanish, rooms get forgotten."
Author: Joan Didion

27. "Every article on these islands has an almost personal character, which gives this simple life, where all art is unknown, something of the artistic beauty of medieval life."
Author: John Millington Synge

28. "In the 1970s, after the Damansky Island clashes, a joke began circulating: 'Optimists study English; pessimists study Chinese; and realists learn to use a Kalashnikov."
Author: John Vaillant

29. "Admittedly, given the Dreamland's tendency towards the dramatic, should any ship come to the island it would probably be full of cannibalistic pirates, piratical cannibals, Jehovah's witnesses or similar. That was acceptable, however. He was sure they could come to some arrangement that didn't involve any unpleasantness. Any unpleasantness to himself,at any rate."
Author: Jonathan L. Howard

30. "So many things were testing his faith. There was the Bible, of course, but the Bible was a book, and so were Bleak House, Treasure Island, Ethan Frome and The Last of the Mohicans. Did it then seem probable, as he had once overheard Dunbar ask, that the answers to riddles of creation would be supplied by people too ignorant to understand the mechanics of rainfall? Had Almighty God, in all His infinite wisdom, really been afraid that men six thousand years ago would succeed in building a tower to heaven?"
Author: Joseph Heller

31. "When they come there will be ten dead bodies and riddle no one can solve on indian island"
Author: Judge Larrence Wargrave

32. "Slowly, but with no doubt or hesitation whatever, and in something of a solemn expectancy, the two animals passed through the broken tumultuous water and moored their boat at the flowery margin of the island."
Author: Kenneth Grahame

33. "As Mary delivered what was to be her last lecture about the Galapagos Islands, she would be stopped mid-sentence for five seconds by a doubt which, if expressed in words, might have come out something like this: "Maybe I'm just a crazy lady who had wandered off the street and into this classroom and started explaining the mysteries of life to these people. And they believe me, although I am utterly mistaken about simply everything."She had to wonder, too, about all the supposedly great teachers of the past, who, although their brains were healthy, had turned out to be as wrong as Roy about what was really going on."
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

34. "And there was a beautiful view but nobody could see cause everybody on the island was saying look at me"
Author: Laurie Anderson

35. "Hey," I say, taking a seat on an island stool. "Did anyone call for me?""Your dad and I had a great day; thanks for asking." Mom smirks."How was your day? Did anyone call for me?" I smile.She dumps a gob of coconut oil into her raw-ful mixture. "Anyone meaning Ben?""Am I that transparent?""It's just that I was sixteen once, too.""Right," I say, shuddering even to think of her pre-forty, pre-me, pre-Dad, when it was just her hippie self, burning incense, going braless, and dating poets."
Author: Laurie Faria Stolarz

36. "This isn't fair," Klaus said finally, but he said it so quietly that the departing islanders probably did not hear. Only his sisters heard him, and the snake the Baudelaires thought they would never see again, and of course Count Olaf, who was huddled in the large, ornate bird cage like an imprisoned beast, and who was the only person to answer him. "Life isn't fair," he said, in his undisguised voice, and for once the Baudelaire orphans agreed with every word the man said."
Author: Lemony Snicket

37. "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."
Author: Maggie Stiefvater

38. "I felt alone out there, like I was on a desert island. I felt like Gilligan."
Author: Mickey Rivers

39. "Adult stories never made sense, and they were so slow to start. They made me feel like there were secrets, Masonic, mythic secrets, to adulthood. Why didn't adults want to read about Narnia, about secret islands and smugglers and dangerous fairies?"
Author: Neil Gaiman

40. "And a rock feels no pain;And an island never cries."
Author: Paul Simon

41. "I have my booksAnd my poetry to protect me;I am shielded in my armor,Hiding in my room, safe within my womb.I touch no one and no one touches me.I am a rock,I am an island."
Author: Paul Simon

42. "Okay, well, that sucks. But, Soph, guess what I saw today."I flopped across my mattress, toeing my sneakers off. "We're on a cursed island surrounded by killer fog, and ruled by two crazy-ass witches. I really can't begin to guess, Jen.""Lara, coming out of the cellar," she said, blowing her pink stripe off her forehead. "And looking super secretive and suspicious. Well, I mean, more super secretive and suspicious than usual."Ah, the cellar. A dank, creepy place full of magical artifacts that had a tendency to move around. Archer and I had spent an awful lot of quality time down there last year."
Author: Rachel Hawkins

43. "By journey's end the brides were much better acquainted with their grooms and more or less pleased with the matches. Sybil Bingham wrote in her diary, thanking God for answering her prayer for filling "the void" with a husband like Hiram, a "treasure rich and undeserved." Having read his insufferable memoir, "A Residence of Twenty-one Years in the Sandwich Islands", all I can say is: I'm happy for her?"
Author: Sarah Vowell

44. "The Senkaku islands are inherently Japanese territory. I want to show my strong determination to prevent this from changing."
Author: Shinzo Abe

45. "It is on the consciousness level of the heart that we begin to understand that we are not separated from life. We begin to understand that we are not small separate islands in a great ocean, but that life is one and that we all are small parts of the Whole. We begin to understand what is really important and meaningful in life. It is on the consciousness level of the heart that we begin to understand that life is about sharing, rather than hoarding. We begin to understand that life is about giving, rather than taking."
Author: Swami Dhyan Giten

46. "Is there anywhere else to sleep tonight... Anywhere?' I pleaded.There's Mei's office, but you'll have to sleep on the floor I'm afraid.' Mei was one of the Ward 9D dietitians.'I'll sleep on the floor any day. I'm used to it back in the Islands,' I laughed tiredly.I settled down on the floor. The three rugs I had brought to cushion my back worked surprisingly well. It was almost more comfortable than the thin mats on the cold concrete floors of the fales in Samoa. The idea of sleeping in someone's office was the best idea I had had all year. I decided that I would keep this secret to myself."
Author: Ta'afuli Andrew Fiu

47. "The wise man, by vigor, mindfulness, restraint, and self-control, creates for himself an island which no flood can submerge."
Author: Thích Nhất Hạnh

48. "[Anna] In February, I woke up from a nap. A bouquet of flowers gathered from the various bushes and shrubs scattered around the island lay on the blanket beside me, a small length of rope wound around their stems.I found T.J. down at the shore. "Someone's been checking the calendar."He grinned. "I didn't want to miss Valentine's Day."I kissed him. "You're sweet to me."Pulling me closer, he said, "It's not hard, Anna."I stared into T.J.'s eyes, and he started to sway. My arms went around his neck and we danced, moving in a circle, the sand soft and warm under our feet."You don't need music, do you?""No," T.J. said. "But I do need you."
Author: Tracey Garvis Graves

49. "If you could decide on characters' destinies it would be like going to the desk of a travel agent who says: "So where do you want to find the whale, in Samoa or in the Aleutian Islands? And when? And do you want to be the one who kills it or let Queequeg do it? Whereas the real lesson of Moby-Dick is that the whale goes wherever it wants."
Author: Umberto Eco

50. "There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate's loot on Treasure Island."
Author: Walt Disney

Island Quotes Pictures