Desert Island Quotes

True friendshipmultiplies the good in life and divides its evils. strive to have friends, for life without friends is like life on a desert island ... to find one real friend in a lifetime is a good fortune;to keep him is a blessing ~ Baltasar Gracian

If I were ever stranded on a desert island, there would be 3 things I'd need: food, shelter, and a grip. ~ George C. Scott

I love my garlic press; in fact, it is probably my one true desert island gadget. But I'm happy to put it aside whenever the smell and sweet taste of slow-cooked garlic is called for. ~ Yotam Ottolenghi

The novels of Daniel Defoe are fundamental to eighteenth-century ways of thinking. They range from the quasi-factual A Journal of the Plague Year, an almost journalistic (but fictional) account of London between 1664 and 1665 (when the author was a very young child), to Robinson Crusoe, one of the most enduring fables of Western culture. If the philosophy of the time asserted that life was, in Hobbes's words, 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short', novels showed ways of coping with 'brutish' reality (the plague; solitude on a desert island) and making the best of it. There was no questioning of authority as there had been throughout the Renaissance.
Instead, there was an interest in establishing and accepting authority, and in the ways of 'society' as a newly ordered whole.

Thus, Defoe's best-known heroine, Moll Flanders, can titillate her readers with her first-person narration of a dissolute life as thief, prostitute, and incestuous wife, all the time telling her story from the vantage point of one who has been accepted back into society and improved her behaviour. ~ Ronald Carter

[Madame Nhu was] the Sandra Dee of South Vietnam. If I were cast on a desert island with her, I would quickly make friends with the natives. ~ Oscar Levant

A sailor was stranded on a desert island and managed to survive by making friends with the local natives - such good friends, in fact, that one day the chief offered him his daughter for an evening's entertainment. Late that night, while they made love, the chief's daughter kept shouting, "Oga, boga! Oga, boga!" The arrogant sailor assumed this must be how the natives express their appreciation when something is fantastic. A few days later the chief invites the sailor for a game of golf. On his first stroke, the chief hit a hole in one. Eager to try out his new vocabulary, the sailor enthusiastically shouted "Oga boga! Oga boga!" The chief turned around with a puzzled look on his face and asked, "What you mean, 'wrong hole'? ~ Osho

It was ironic, but when you scratched the surface, most successful men were working for one thing only
to retire
and the sooner the better. Whereas women were the complete opposite. She had never heard a woman say she was working so she could retire to a desert island or to live on a boat. It was probably, she thought, because most women didn't think they deserved to do nothing. ~ Candace Bushnell

Dr. Warren was of the mental build of the man whose life would be interesting and full of outlook if it were spent on a desert island or in the Bastille. ~ Frances Hodgson Burnett

If you want to earn the gratitude of your own age you must keep in step with it. But if you do that you will produce nothing great. If you have something great in view you must address yourself to posterity: only then, to be sure, you will probably remain unknown to your contemporaries; you will be like a man compelled to spend his life on a desert island and there toiling to erect a memorial so that future seafarers shall know he once existed. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Living in a society, instead of on a desert island, does not relieve a man of the responsibility of supporting his own life. ~ Ayn Rand

Who would wave a flag to be rescued if they had a desert island of their own? That was the thing that spoilt Robinson Crusoe. In the end he came home. There never ought to be an end. ~ Arthur Ransome

And Josh wanted to tell her what he knew: that love might look like a shore but turn out to be a desert island, where you roamed alone, talking to yourself, trying to crack open coconuts with your shoe. So thirsty you drank the salt water. So hungry you ate the sand. ~ Leah Stewart

Bod said, 'I want to see life. I want to hold it in my hands. I want to leave a footprint on the sand of a desert island. I want to play football with people. I want,' he said, and then he paused and he thought. 'I want everything. ~ Neil Gaiman

We couldn't bear to be apart. So if Kizuki had lived, I'm sure we would have been together, loving each other, and gradually growing unhappy."

Unhappy? Why's that?"

With her fingers, Naoko combed her hair back several times. She had taken her barrette off, which made the hair fall over her face when she dropped her head forward.

Because we would have had to pay the world back what we owed it," she said, raising her eyes to mine. "The pain of growing up. We didn't pay when we should have, so now the bills are due. Which is why Kizuki did what he did, and why I'm here. We were like kids who grew up naked on a desert island. If we got hungry, we'd just pick a banana; if we got lonely, we'd go to sleep in each other's arms. But that kind of thing doesn't last forever. We grew up fast and had to enter society. Which is why you were so important to us. You were the link connecting us with the outside world. We were struggling through you to fit in with the outside world as best we could. In the end, it didn't work, of course."

I nodded.

I wouldn't want you to think that we were using you, though. Kizuki really loved you. It just so happened that our connection with you was our first connection with anyone else. And it still is. Kizuki may be dead, but you are still my only link with the outside world. And just as Kizuki loved you, I love you. We never meant to hurt you, but we probably did; we probably ended up making a deep wo ~ Haruki Murakami

For children who depend on mentally escaping into their minds to survive, imagination can become both refuge and desert island. ~ Na'ama Yehuda

You come first; I won't accept it any other way. If a madman is waving a gun, you step behind me. If we are stranded on a desert island, you get the fresh water. If we both come down with the flu, I pick up the medicine. If we both have a crap day, you vent first. If there is anything you can't do, we won't do it 'til you can – regardless of how much I want it ~ Genna Rulon

Taking the 'desert island challenge' which leads Christians to submit their family life to Sola Scriptura inevitably leads them to desire to submit their corporate worship to Sola Scriptura.
(Excerpt from the forward of "How God Wants Us to Worship Him" by Joseph C. Morecraft) ~ Douglas W. Phillips

I want to see life. I want to hold it in my hands. I want to leave a footprint on the sand of a desert island. I want to play football with people. I want," he said, and then he paused and thought. "I want everything. ~ Neil Gaiman

I felt alone out there, like I was on a desert island. I felt like Gilligan. ~ Mickey Rivers

A romance is never just a romance, there's adventure, mystery and movement.

You need a grand, dramatic setting - the Swiss Alps were always an personal favourite of mine - and a chance meeting, on a train, a cruise, or perhaps the hero and heroine find themselves shipwrecked on a desert island.

The men are normally rich, well-to-do - but never vulgar with their money. Young men lack the maturity to take control so an older man is essential to provide the reassurance the heroine's needs.

There's always a fair amount of turbulence before he sweeps in to save the day. A happy ending is an absolute must. ~ Ida Pollock

An armchair is always an armchair, to the modern child, never a ship, never a desert island. The pattern on the wall are patterns; not characters whose faces change at dusk ... The trouble is, the children have no imagination. They are sweet, and have carefree, honest eyes; but they have not any magic in their day. The magic has all gone ... ~ Daphne Du Maurier

Donald Westlake's Parker novels are among the small number of books I read over and over. Forget all that crap you've been telling yourself about War and Peace and Proust-these are the books you'll want on that desert island. ~ Lawrence Block

Put any two people together and each will seek ways of feeling superior to the other. If a ship went down in the Pacific and a single sailor managed to swim to a desert island, would he be pleased to see, ten minutes later, another sailor emerging from the surf? Quite possibly - but only if the new arrival accepted that the first man was now a landed aristocrat while he himself was an illegal immigrant. ~ Michael Foley

A bird, music and food -desert island items ~ Michael Johnson

Children ask me sometimes what book I'd take to a desert island, but I think I couldn't go to a desert island unless it had a library. ~ Mary Stolz

I want us all to face our fears and stop behaving like our goal in life is to merely survive. "Surviving" is for wimps and game show contestants stranded in the jungle or on a desert island. You are not stranded. You own the store ... You deserve better. ~ Michael Moore

One of the world's most tiresome questions is what object one would bring to a desert island,because people always answer "a deck of cards" or "Anna Karenina" when the obvious answer is "a well equipped boat and a crew to sail me off the island and back home where I can play all the card games and read all the Russian novels I want. ~ Lemony Snicket

If you were to be stranded on a desert island, what three items would you take? I gave this frivolous answer: A cat, a hat and a piece of string. ~ Joanne Harris

Rick Owens is my desert island designer. I could live in his clothes alone, and I collect Ossie Clark. ~ Mia Sara

Have I gotten everything right? I doubt it. Not even the great Daniel Defoe did that; in Robinson Crusoe, our hero strips naked, swims out to the ship he has recently escaped....and then fills up his pockets with items he will need to stay alive on his desert island. ~ Stephen King

If you are in a remote desert island, let your best hope be your own efforts to build a ship instead of waiting for a ship to appear among the fogs! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Khaled, my first teacher, was the kind of man who carried his past in the temple fires of his eyes, and fed the flames with pieces of his broken heart. I've known men like Khaled in prisons, on battlefields, and in the dens where smugglers, mercenaries, and other exiles meet. They all have certain characteristics in common. They're tough, because there's a kind of toughness that's found in the worst sorrow. They're honest, because the truth of what happened to them won't let them lie. They're angry, because they can't forget the past or forgive it. And they're lonely. Most of us pretend, with greater or lesser success, that the minute we live in is something we can share. But the past for every one of us is a desert island; and those like Khaled, who find themselves marooned there, are always alone. ~ Gregory David Roberts

Tell me you spotted a condom tree over to the right by the stream of lube. ~ Jane Davitt

A man abandoned by himself on a desert island would adorn neither his hut nor his person; nor would he seek for flowers, still less would he plant them, in order to adorn himself therewith. It is only in society that it occurs to him to be not merely a man, but a refined man after his kind (the beginning of civilization). For such do we judge him to be who is both inclined and apt to communicate his pleasure to others, and who is not contented with an object if he cannot feel satisfaction in it in common with others. Again, every one expects and requires from every one else this reference to universal communication of pleasure, as it were from an original compact dictated by humanity itself. ~ Immanuel Kant

What a splendid king you'd make of a desert island - you and you alone. ~ Sophocles

I guess if there was a desert island scenario and I only could take one font with me, I guess it would be Helvetica, though it has it's limitations, I think it's incredibly versatile and gets the job done and I also think it's one of the typefaces that will really survive the test of time beyond the next several decades if not into the next century. ~ Khoi Vinh

Not that I was incapable of friendship. 'Don't be shy', the teachers coaxed. I was not shy, only extremely choosy. And Denise shone like a diamond. If you had to ask me to define paradise, I would have said a desert island which Denise could visit, on a boat. ~ Anneli Rufus

At school some learning by heart was compulsory, though not irksome. But this intake was out-distanced many times, as it always is among people who need poetry, by a private anthology, both of those automatically absorbed and of poems consciously chosen and memorized as though one were stocking up for a desert island or for a stretch of solitary. ~ Patrick Leigh Fermor

There is a rich vein of jokes about economists and their assumptions. Take the old one about the engineer, the physicist, and the economist. They find themselves shipwrecked on a desert island with nothing to eat but a sealed can of beans. How to get at them? The engineer proposes breaking the can open with a rock. The physicist suggests heating the can in the sun, until it bursts. The economist's approach: "First, assume we have a can opener.... ~ Benoit B Mandelbrot

Zuleika, on a desert island, would have spent most of her time in looking for a man's footprint. ~ Max Beerbohm

For me, a desert island is no tragedy, neither is a deserted planet. ~ Peter Wessel Zapffe

I would love to go to Iran. The island of Madagascar, everyone says is pretty exotic, or the wonderful Namibian desert. ~ Michael Palin

A freelance life, a life in the arts, is sometimes like putting messages in bottles, on a desert island, and hoping that someone will find one of your bottles and open it and read it, and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you: appreciation, or a commision, or money, or love. And you have to accept that you may put out a hundred things for every bottle that winds up coming back. ~ Neil Gaiman

You put a guy on a desert island, he'll do it to mud, a chicken, a barrel, anything, a knothole. ~ Lenny Bruce

In these days of physical fitness, hair dye, and plastic surgery, you can live much of your life without feeling or even looking old. But then one day, your knee goes, or your shoulder, or your back, or your hip. Your hot flashes come to an end; things droop. Spots appear. Your cleavage looks like a peach pit. If your elbows faced forward, you would kill yourself. You're two inches shorter than you used to be. You're ten pounds fatter and you cannot lose a pound of it to save your soul. Your hands don't work as well as they once did and you can't open bottles, jars, wrappers, and especially those gadgets that are encased tightly in what seems to be molded Mylar. If you were stranded on a desert island and your food were sealed in plastic packaging, you would starve to death. You take so many pills in the morning you don't have room for breakfast.
You lose close friends and discover one of the worst truths of old age: they're irreplaceable. People who run four miles a day and eat only nuts and berries drop dead. People who drink a quart of whiskey and smoke two packs of cigarettes a day drop dead. You are suddenly in a lottery, the ultimate game of chance, and someday your luck will run out. Everybody dies. There's nothing you can do about it. Whether or not you eat six almonds a day. Whether or not you believe in God. ~ Nora Ephron

You can see when an actor gets bored: Their eyes go dead. I promised myself I'd never let that happen. If it does, I'll go and live on a desert island for a year. ~ Anna Friel

What luxury would I take to a desert island? A mirror. It's true. I'd miss me. ~ Simon Cowell

For a desert island, one would choose a good dictionary rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in relation to its readers, a dictionary is absolutely passive and may legitimately be read in an infinite number of ways. ~ W. H. Auden

I've been asked over the years to compile a list of desert-island discs. I couldn't do that. If I was trapped on a desert island, I don't think I'd want 10 songs to bring with me. ~ John Lydon

We are social beings and confidence is framed by our interactions in the social world. It's rather difficult to be confident or shy on a desert island with no one to share your coconuts! ~ Gary Wood

His heart is a desert island ... The whole scope, the whole energy of his mind surround and protect him; his depths isolate him and guard him against the truth. He flatters himself that he is entirely alone there ... Patience, dear lady. Perhaps, one day, he will discover some footprint on the sand ... What holy and happy terror, what salutary fright, once he recognizes in that pure sign of grace that his island is mysteriously inhabited! ... ~ Paul Valery

We're all trapped. It's always 1734. All of us, we're stuck in the same time capsule, the same as those television shows where the same people are marooned on the same desert island for thirty seasons and never age or escape. They just wear more makeup. In a creepy way, those shows are maybe too authentic. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Imagine fifty thousand men trapped on a desert island, deprived of food and water and sex but somehow kept alive for fifty thousand years. Then, after they've been tormented a hundred steps beyond insanity, tortured past self-mutilation and cannibalism, somebody drops off a sculpture of a naked woman made from T-bone steaks. If you could then capture the sound of them simultaneously fucking and eating and tearing her to shreds and broadcast it into the center of your skull at ten thousand watts, it would still sound absolutely nothing like what I heard. ~ David Wong

You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary - it's always imaginary - world in which I would like to live.
(Interview, The Paris Review) ~ William S. Burroughs

This was my first real lesson in politics ... If you are cast on a desert island with only a screwdriver, hatchet, and the chisel to make a boat with, why, go and make the best one you can. It would be better if you had a saw, but you haven't, so with men. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

Some gangs of friends formed subgroups of five, mirroring us, where each friend could have a favorite Duran without stepping on the toes or desires of the other four friends, because if you were an Andy fan, clearly you could not be friends with another Andy fan. That would not work. You could be friends with a Nick fan, however, because there was no conflict of interest. Both friends could live together in harmony with Nick and Andy on that designated fantasy desert island for ever and ever, without a hint of envy. ~ Nigel John Taylor

All justice is inherently social. Can someone on a desert island be either just or unjust? ~ Thomas Sowell

As much as I am a huge soccer fan, music just kills it when it comes to importance. I could go to a desert island without a football and survive happily, but if I had to go without music, I think I'd end up killing myself. It fuels my soul. It always has. ~ Joe Elliott

Ian Fleming

The CBC Interview, 1953

He doesn't use Anglo-Saxon four-letter words, "I don't like seeing them on the page."

When asked why his novels are so popular in light of the dirtiness of the trade (of espionage), Fleming said, "The books have pace and plenty of action. And espionage is not regarded by the majority of the public as a dirty trade. They regard it as a rather sort of ah, ah very romantic affair… Spying has always been regarded as (a) very romantic one-man job, so-to-speak. A one man against a whole police force or an army."

Regarding heroes of his time, Fleming said, "I think that although they may have feet of clay, ah, we probably all have, and all human beings have, there's no point in dwelling entirely on the feet. There are many other parts of the animal to be examined. And I think people like to read about heroes."

BBC Interview on Desert Island Discs

Question: Had the character of James Bond been growing in your mind for a long time?
Ian Fleming's response: "No, I can't say I had, really. He sort of, ah, developed when I was just on the edge of getting married, after having been a bachelor for so long, and I really wanted to take my mind off the agony. And so I decided to sit down and write a book."

Question: How much long do you think you can keep Bond going?
Ian Fleming's response: "Well, I don't know. It depends on how much I, how much more I can go on following ~ Ian Fleming

Victoria was just as much in love with me as I was with her. We could not bear to be apart for a single second. We were like two lovers shipwrecked on a desert island. There was no world outside our love. ~ Andy Gibb

When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness, and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, or what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost, with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair. ~ Blaise Pascal

Personality is a person among persons. There is no personality of one man on a desert island. ~ Kwame Kilpatrick

She has even secret mischievous moments in which she wishes she could get him alone, on a desert island, away from all ties and with nobody else in the world to consider, and just drag him off his pedestal and see him making love like any common man. ~ George Bernard Shaw

In other fields of endeavor poverty has been the spur to action. Napoleon was born in obscurity, the son of a hand-to-mouth scrivener in the backward island of Corsica. Abraham Lincoln, the boast and pride of America, the man who made this land too hot for the feet of slaves, came from a log cabin in the Ohio backwoods. So did James A. Garfield. Ulysses Grant came from a tanyard to become the world's greatest general. Thomas A. Edison commenced as a newsboy on a railway train. ~ Joseph Devlin

No man is an island. ~ John Donne

When I found the beautiful white bones in the desert I picked them up and took them home too ... I have used these things to say what is to me the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it. ~ Georgia O'Keeffe

I don't know the numbers, but roughly half of the people who came through Ellis Island returned home. They came here to make money, not to make history. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

When people are kids their parents teach them all sorts of stuff, some of it true and useful, some of it absurd hogwash (example of former: don't crap your pants; example of latter: Columbus discovered America). This is why puberty happens. The purpose of puberty is to shoot an innocent and gullible child full of nasty glandular secretions that manifest in the mind as confusion, in the innards as horniness, upon the skin as pimples, and on the tongue as cocksure venomous disbelief in every piece of information, true or false, gleaned from one's parents since infancy. The net result is a few years of familial hell culminating in the child's exodus from the parental nest, sooner or later followed by a peace treaty and the emergence of the postpubescent as an autonomous, free-thinking human being who knows that Columbus only trespassed on an island inhabited by our lost and distant Indian relatives, but who also knows not to crap his pants. ~ David James Duncan

THE OPENING OF EYES After R. S. Thomas That day I saw beneath dark clouds, the passing light over the water and I heard the voice of the world speak out, I knew then, as I had before, life is no passing memory of what has been nor the remaining pages in a great book waiting to be read. It is the opening of eyes long closed. It is the vision of far off things seen for the silence they hold. It is the heart after years of secret conversing, speaking out loud in the clear air. It is Moses in the desert fallen to his knees before the lit bush. It is the man throwing away his shoes as if to enter heaven and finding himself astonished, opened at last, fallen in love with solid ground. ~ David Whyte

When you're a little kid, you are small, your life is small - and you're terrifically aware of that. But when you read, you can ride Arabian horses across the desert, you can be a dogsledder. ~ Janet Fitch

Without music and dance, life is a journey through a desert. ~ Pat Conroy

Prime-time network television has become an island without religion in an ever-more-religious America. ~ Ben Stein

I pray that we would let God take us through the desert - not just so that we can arrive in the Promised Land, but so that we can talk, or simply listen, to Him along the way. ~ Katie Kiesler

A just city should favor justice and the just, hate tyranny and injustice, and give them both their just deserts. ~ Al-Farabi

I'm a black woman who is from Central Falls, Rhode Island. I'm dark skinned. I'm quirky. I'm shy. I'm strong. I'm guarded. I'm weak at times. I'm sensual. I'm not overtly sexual. I am so many things in so many ways and I will never see myself on screen. And the reason I will never see myself up on screen is because that does not translate with being black. ~ Viola Davis

Lost

In black as solid as a mire
In a land no one would die for
In a time I was lost
To anyone who ever loved me
The world set itself on fire
And the sky collapsed above me

In a place no one could call home
In a place I breathed and slept
In a battle no one understood
That continued all the same
I sat defenseless and alone
With the insignificance of my name

In the midst of the Lord's birth
On a night meant to be peaceful
In a country of the Prophet
Where women don't live free
I spoke to God from the shaking Earth
And prayed my mother would forgive me

In a city without power
In a desert torn by religion
In a bank between two rivers
We added up the decade's cost
And glorified the final hour
Of a war that everyone had lost

In the dust of helplessness
In a concrete bunker
In a fate I chose myself
I waited without remorse
To fight again as recompense
For wasted lives and discourse

-an original poem about an attack on our base in Iraq during the Arab Spring ~ Dianna Skowera

Thankfully I'm not endlessly ambitious, but I have done some crazy ambitious things like buying an island off the west coast of Scotland in the late Sixties. ~ Jack Bruce

When will your sun come - to make everything reborn?
-The burn of your fingers pressed against my being-
I would like to fall asleep in your body again
And make of your smiles an open source
When my life is like a desolate desert
I would like to fall asleep by the light sand of your skin.
Your voice - your voice alone knows how to put an end to my anger
As your lips faint on the pains of my yesterday
When will you come to drape me in your radiant sun?
So that I find life in its first taste
(-The glow of your hair is a roof of moonlight.) ~ Emmanuelle Soni-Dessaigne

Home. One place is just like another, really. Maybe not. But truth is it's all just rock and dirt and people are roughly the same. I was born up there but I'm no stranger here. Have always felt at home everywhere, even in Virginia, where they hate me. Everywhere you go there's nothing but the same rock and dirt and houses and people and deer and birds. They give it all names, but I'm at home everywhere. Odd thing: unpatriotic. I was at home in England. I would be at home in the desert. In Afghanistan or far Typee. All mine, it all belongs to me. My world. ~ Michael Shaara

A man is an island in the only sense that matters, not an easy way to be. We live in mystery, a cosmos of separate lonely bodies, men, insects, stars. It is all loneliness and men know it best. ~ Bernard Malamud

Satan may win some present battles, but the outcome of the war has already been determined - and Satan knows it. When we know that truth as well, it gives us courage to persevere through the downturns. Like castaways who keep on rowing because the map shows an island ahead, we'll have the courage to press on. Perhaps this is the reason the devil tries to discourage people from reading this amazing book. The devil has turned thousands of people away from this portion of God's Word. He does not want anyone to ~ David Jeremiah

To get even near humility, even for a moment, is like a drink of cold water to a man in a desert. ~ C.S. Lewis

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

There are several sorts of religions, not only in different parts of the island, but even in every town; some worshipping the sun, others the moon or one of the planets. ~ Thomas More

In the silence, the boy understood that the desert, the wind, and the sun were also trying to understand the signs written by the hand, and were seeking to follow their paths, and to understand what had been written on a single emerald. He saw that omens were scattered throughout the earth and in space, and that there was no reason or significance attached to their appearance; he could see that not the deserts, nor the winds, nor the sun, nor people knew why they had been created. But that the hand had a reason for all of this, and that only the hand could perform miracles, or transform the sea into a desert . . . or a man into the wind. ~ Paulo Coelho

I have always loved Waffle House. It's been like an oasis in the desert many times late at night after one of my concerts. ~ Trace Adkins

Then, seemingly from out of nowhere, appeared sea gulls… forming a welcoming committee for an island I hadn't the slightest desire to visit. ~ William Waterman Sherman

Thus did the terrified three learn the difference between an island of make-believe and the same island come true. ~ J.M. Barrie

I have to say,comparatively my life was dull - I'd never fallen in love with my own rapist or been kidnapped and held captive on a tropical island. Of course, there's always tomorrow. ~ Marshall Thornton

Here ends the story of a ship, but there will always be other ships, for we are an island race. Through all our centuries, the sea has ruled our destiny. There will always be other ships and men to sail in them. It is these men, in peace or war, to whom we owe so much. Above all victories, beyond all loss, in spite of changing values in a changing world, they give to us, their countrymen, eternal and indomitable pride. ~ Noel Coward

I am the cockroach, I am my leg, I am my hair, I am the section of brightest light on the wall plaster - I am every Hellish piece of myself - life is so pervasive in me that if they divide me in pieces like a lizard, the pieces will keep on shaking and writhing. I am the silence etched on a wall, and the most ancient butterfly flutters in and looks at me: just the same as always. From birth to death is what I call human in myself, and I shall never actually die. But this is not eternity, it is condemnation.
How opulent this silence is. It is the accumulation of centuries. It is the silence of the cockroach looking. The world looks at itself in me. Everything looks at everything, everything experiences the other; in this desert things know things. ~ Clarice Lispector

Remembering the loss of those Irishmen from all parts of the island who were sent to their deaths in the imperialist slaughter of the First World War is crucial to understanding our history. It is also important to recognise the special significance in which the Battle of the Somme and the First World War is held. ~ Martin McGuinness

Images surround us; cavorting broadcast in the minds of others, we wear the motley tailored by their bad digestions, the shame and failure, plague pandemics and private indecencies, unpaid bills, and animal ecstasies remembered in hospital beds, our worst deeds and best intentions will not stay still, scolding, mocking, or merely chattering they assail each other, shocked at recognition. Sometimes simplicity serves, though even the static image of Saint John Baptist received prenatal attentions (six months along, leaping for joy in his mother's womb when she met Mary who had conceived the day before): once delivered he stands steady in a camel's hair loincloth at a ford in the river, morose, ascetic on locusts and honey, molesting passers-by, upbraiding the flesh on those who wear it with pleasure. And the Nazarene whom he baptized? Three years pass, in a humility past understanding: and then death, disappointed? unsuspecting? and the body left on earth, the one which was to rule the twelve tribes of Israel, and on earth, left crying out - My God, why dost thou shame me? Hopelessly ascendent in resurrection, the image is pegged on the wind by an epileptic tentmaker, his strong hands stretch the canvas of faith into a gaudy caravanserai, shelter for travelers wearied of the burning sand, lured by forgetfulness striped crimson and gold, triple-tiered, visible from afar, redolent of the east, and level and wide the sun crashes the fist of reality into that desert where the truth ~ William Gaddis

Nothin very bad happen to me lately.
How you explain that? --I explain that, Mr
Bones,
terms o' your bafflin odd sobriety.
Sober as man can get, no girls, no telephones,
what could happen bad to Mr Bones?
--If life is a handkerchief sandwich,

in a modesty of death I join my father
who dared so long agone leave me.
A bullet on a concrete stoop
close by a smothering southern sea
spreadeagled on an island, by my knee.
--You is from hunger, Mr Bones,

I offers you this handkerchief, now set
your left foot by my right foot,
shoulder to shoulder, all that jazz,
arm in arm, by the beautiful sea,
hum a little, Mr Bones.
--I saw nobody coming, so I went instead. ~ John Berryman

After a while I understood that, talking this way, everything dissolves: justice, pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman I made love to and I remembered how, holding her small shoulders in my hands sometimes, I felt a violent wonder at her presence like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat, muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her. Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances. ~ Robert Hass

Life is a warfare; and he who easily desponds deserts a double duty
he betrays the noblest property of man, which is dauntless resolution; and he rejects the providence of that All-Gracious Being who guides and rules the universe. ~ Jane Porter

Being with him made her feel as though her soul had escaped from the narrow confines of her island country into the vast, extravagant spaces of his. He made her feel as though the world belonged to them- as though it lay before them like an opened frog on a dissecting table, begging to be examined. ~ Arundhati Roy

I grew up with landscape as a recourse, with the possibility of exiting the horizontal realm of social relations for a vertical alignment with earth and sky, matter and spirit. Vast open spaces speak best to this craving, the spaces I myself first found in the desert and then in the western grasslands. ~ Rebecca Solnit

It was my grandfather's island. Looming and bleak, folded in mist, guarded by a million screeching birds, it looked like some ancient fortress constructed by giants.
As I gazed up at its sheer cliffs, tops disappearing in a reef of ghostly clouds, the idea that this was a magical place didn't seem so ridiculous. ~ Ransom Riggs

A thousand fantasies Begin to throng into my memory, Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire, And airy tongues that syllable men's names On sands and shores and desert wildernesses ~ John Milton