Rikers Island Quotes

Once they are charged, too many poor New Yorkers find themselves trapped by our unjust bail system. Unable to pay for bail, they languish in Rikers Island or other jails while they await trial, regardless of guilt. ~ Eric Schneiderman

I was in juvenile detention center, and I was in Rikers Island. And there was an anthology written by the inmates called 'The Pen,' and I - you know, I had a crush on a girl, and she left me when I was incarcerated. And I found this poem in this anthology that talked about having your heart broken and being incarcerated. ~ Lemon Andersen

Issues are like tissues. You pull one out and another appears! ~ Gary Goldstein

Acquittal. The kourtroom broke into a loud cheer. The judge just gave up calling for order. He had to wait for the shouting to die down. It was a long time coming. All the spectators were jumping around hugging each other. The marshals led me out of the courtroom and handcuffed me. They brought me back to Rikers Island where i was put into solitary confinement. ~ Assata Shakur

He had the radio turned to some Spanish-language station at a volume that reminded me of the holding tank at Riker's Island - and for an added touch of authenticity he screamed 'Maricon!' and waved his fist out the open window at another driver who had the audacity to attempt to share the road with us. ~ Andrew Vachss

I was 10, and I played Jim Hawkins in 'Treasure Island' at school, and this great Liverpudlian actor called Andrew Schofield - he was Johnny Rotten in 'Sid And Nancy' - came to watch it, and he had a word with my mum and dad afterwards and told them I should have a go at the Everyman youth theatre. I've never looked back. ~ Stephen Graham

When nationalism first became a religion, the English looked at the map, and, noticing that their island lay very high in the Northern Hemisphere, evolved the pleasing theory that the further north you live the more virtuous you become. The histories I was given when I was a little boy started off by explaining in the naïvest way that a cold climate made people energetic while a hot one made them lazy, and hence the defeat of the Spanish Armada. ~ George Orwell

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

Wealthy men can't live in an island that is encircled by poverty. We all breathe the same air. We must give a chance to everyone, at least a basic chance. ~ Ayrton Senna

Target launch date for Falcon I maiden flight is Halloween(October 31) from our island launch complex in the Kwajalein Atoll. For potential customers out there, I should mention that Kwajalein has some of the worlds best scuba diving and snorkeling! It is literally a tropical paradise. ~ Elon Musk

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

Captain's Log...

...Four days have passed with no sign of human life on this island. Hunger is about to push me to the point of...

...Eating pocket lint.

It looks edible. ~ Ken Akamatsu

You could drive around the island of Tahiti in two hours, in a day, in two days. You could pass the slower cars, the pick-up trucks with their loads of mothers and kids in ragged T-shirts, the bicycles turning in lazy circles by the side of the road, the bony yellow dogs trying to cross – if you never stopped, the drive could take less than two hours, provided that you weren't entering or leaving Papeete during the morning or late afternoon traffic jams. At the other extreme, you could visit every relative living around the island – your aunt who ran the general store in Papeari, your uncle who worked at the gas station in Mahina, your countless cousins who were expecting babies or who had just given birth, your grandmother who lived with your aunt who lived with your great-aunt...this type of tour de l'ile could take an entire day or two or three days. ~ Lillian Howan

O ye by wandering tempest sown
'Neath every alien star,
Forget not whence the breath was blown
That wafted you afar!
For ye are still her ancient seed
On younger soil let fall
Children of Britain's island-breed,
To whom the Mother in her need
Perchance may one day call. ~ William Watson

We may be a small island, but we are not a small people. ~ Edward Heath

Let us work toward greater cooperation with all Caribbean Countries, whether we speak English, Dutch, French or Spanish, whether we are independent or not, and whether we be island or continental territories. ~ Said Musa

It's your call, but just because you got three monkeys off your back doesn't mean the simians have left the island. ~ Charles Locks

Independence, like honor, is a rocky island, without a beach. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

No matter how much the inhabitants might try to hide it, there was a savagery about this island, a bloodlust and pride that bound every mother, father, and child in a clannish commitment to the hunt. ~ Nathaniel Philbrick

Most people spend their entire lives on a fantasy island called 'Someday I'll.' ~ Denis Waitley

Disheartened, enraptured, and strangely lightheaded, Grady emerged from the trees and walked back through town to the island bridge, his ankles and hands marked up with thorn scratches. ~ Molly Ringle

The Process of Explication"

I

Students, look at this table
And now when you see a man six feet tall
You can call him a fathom.

Likewise, students when yes and you do that and other stuff
Likewise too the shoe falls upon the sun
And the alphabet is full of blood
And when you knock upon a sentence in the
Process of explication you are going to need a lot of rags

Likewise, hello and goodbye.


II

Nick Algiers is my student
And he sits there in a heap in front of me thinking of suicide
And so, I am the one in front of him
And I dance around him in a circle and light him on fire
And with his face on fire, I am suddenly ashamed.

Likewise the distance between us then
Is the knife that is not marriage.


III

Students, I can't lie, I'd rather be doing something else, I guess
Like making love or writing a poem
Or drinking wine on a tropical island
With a handsome boy who wants to hold me all night.

I can't lie that dreams are ridiculous.
And in dreaming myself upon the moon
I have made the moon my home and no one
Can ever get to me to hit me or kiss my lips.

And as my bridegroom comes and takes me away from you
You all ask me what is wrong and I say it is
That I will never win. ~ Dorothea Lasky

It is this kind of resourcefulness, I think, that explains how this hardy band of Vikings managed to survive more than one thousand years on an island that is about as hospitable to human habitation as the planet Pluto - if Pluto were a planet, that is, which it's not. ~ Eric Weiner

Vast tracts of ocean, whether Polynesia, Micronesia or Melanesia, contain island populations that remain outside the modern world. They know about it, they may have traveled to it, they appreciate artifacts and medical help from it, but they live their daily lives much as hundreds of generations of ancestors before them, without money, electricity, phones, TV or manufactured food. ~ Andrew Rayner

While the sound mixing was underway, Bonzo was on the loose, taking care of buisness his own way. One night he showed up backstage at a Deep Purple concert at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island. Bonzo was drunk and in very high spirits, and was wobbling on his feet in the wings when he noticed a free microphone during a lull in the music. Staggering forward, Bonzo walked out onto the stage before the Deep Purple roadies could grab him. The group stopped playing, amazed, as Bonzo grabbed the mike and shouted, 'My name is John Bonham of Led Zeppelin, and I just wanna tell ya that we got a new album comin' out and that it's fuckin' great!!' Then Bonzo turned to leave, but before he went he turned back and gratuitously insulted Deep Purple's guitarist. 'And as far as Tommy Bolin is concerned, he can't play for shit!! ~ Stephen Davis

We live each day as if it were merely a rehearsal for the next, and the cosy existence at 7, rue de Grenelle, with its daily proof of continuity, suddenly seems like an island battered by storms. ~ Muriel Barbery

Maya knows that her mother left her in Island Books. But maybe that's what happens to all children at a certain age. Some children are left in shoe stores. And some children are left in toy stores. And some children are left in sandwich shops. And your whole life is determined by what store you get left in. She does not want to live in the sandwich shop. ~ Gabrielle Zevin

An oceanic expanse of pre-dawn gray white below obscures a checkered grid of Saskatchewan, a snow plain nicked by the dark, unruly lines of woody swales. One might imagine that little is to be seen from a plane at night, but above the clouds the Milky Way is a dense, blazing arch. A full moon often lights the planet freshly, and patterns of human culture, artificially lit, are striking in ways not visible in daylight. One evening I saw the distinctive glows of cities around Delhi diffused like spiral galaxies in a continuous deck of stratus clouds far below us. In Algeria and on the Asian steppes, wind-whipped pennants of gas flared. The jungle burned in incandescent spots in Malaysia and Brazil. One clear evening at 20,000 feet over Manhattan, I could see, it seemed, every streetlight halfway to the end of Long Island. A summer lightning bolt unexpectedly revealed thousands of bright dots on the ink-black veld of the northern Transvaal: sheep. ~ Barry Lopez

I was first imprisoned in Pretoria, and then, thereafter, I was taken to Robben Island. I stayed there for a couple of weeks. I was taken back to Pretoria when I was charged in the Rivonia trial, when I was then sent to Robben Island for life. ~ Nelson Mandela

In this he was like most Midwesterners. Directions are very important to them. They have an innate need to be oriented, even in their anecdotes. Any story related by a Midwesterner will wander off at some point into a thicket of interior monologue along the lines of "We were staying at a hotel that was eight blocks northeast of the state capital building. Come to think of it, it was northwest. And I think it was probably more like nine blocks. And this woman without any clothes on, naked as the day she was born except for a coonskin cap, came running at us from the southwest... or was it the southeast?" If there are two Midwesterns present and they both witnessed the incident, you can just about write off the anecdote because they will spend the rest of the afternoon arguing points of the compass and will never get back to the original story. You can always tell a Midwestern couple in Europe because they will be standing on a traffic island in the middle of a busy intersection looking at a windblown map and arguing over which way is west. European cities, with their wandering streets and undisciplined alleys, drive Midwesterners practically insane. ~ Bill Bryson

Slowly the sky turned from the color of cornflower to that of hyacinth, and the Ferris wheel at Coney Island appeared like a ring of diamonds against the twilight. New York-that city made of canyons between tall buildings, and ornate houses filled with glittering things that might trap a girl forever-was nothing more than a few dots on an infinite landscape. The atmosphere was crystalline and afforded her a perfect view. Only from this place was she able to see how limited the city was, after everything, and how wide open the world could all of a sudden become. ~ Anna Godbersen

The baby's eyes were dark, almost black, and when I nursed her in the middle of the night, she'd stare at me with a stunned, shipwrecked look as if my body were the island she'd washed up on. ~ Jenny Offill

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

If the students were taught about shuttle flights, plate tectonics and submarine volcanoes, they were also immersed in the traditional myths of their culture - the ancient story, for example, of how the island of Pohnpei had been built under the direction of a mystical octopus, Lidakika. (I was fascinated by this, for it was the only cephalopod creation myth I had ever heard. ~ Oliver Sacks

Warriors in some cultures drink the blood of their enemies. Some people consume the blood of animals." "As a rule, here on Ice Island, they restrain themselves. ~ Chet Williamson

She could smell the sea in the air, but more than that, she could smell the scent of the grass as it awoke from its winter slumber. She could hear the sound of crickets as they sang to the emerging stars. It was springtime on the North Island. It was springtime for the world. ~ Diana Peterfreund

That strange turbulence that rises when you begin to wash up on the island of your own little self and you don't see how you could ever sustain yourself there. ~ Sue Monk Kidd

If you aren't being treated in a decent manner, speak up. Sometimes you have to fight the storm of pessimism to reach the sunny island of contentment. ~ Torron-Lee Dewar

We can safely make one prophecy: whatever the outcome of this war, the British Empire is at an end. It has been mortally wounded. The future of the British people is to die of hunger and tuberculosis in their cursed island. (4th February 1945) ~ Adolf Hitler

[Nicholson] Baker can't seem to get enough of the wisdom of Gandhi and cites at length an open letter he wrote to the British people on 3 July 1940. "Your soldiers are doing the same work of destruction as the Germans," wrote the Mahatma. "I want you to fight Nazism without arms." He went on to say: "Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself, man, woman and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them." I must say that everything in me declines to be addressed in that tone of voice ~ Christopher Hitchens

He could not feel that they were an island of life journeying through an abyss of death. He felt almost the opposite--that life was waiting outside the little iron egg-shell in which they rode, ready at any moment to break in, and that, if it killed them, it would kill them by excess of its vitality. He hoped passionately that if they were to perish they would perish by the "unbodying" of the space-ship and not by suffocation within it. To be let out, to be free, to dissolve into the ocean of eternal noon, seemed to him at certain moments a consummation even more desirable than their return to Earth. And if he had felt some such lift of the heart when first he passed through heaven on their outward journey, he felt it now tenfold, for now he was convinced that the abyss was full of life in the most literal sense, full of living creatures. ~ C.S. Lewis

And being an "equal opportunity offender" - as in, "It's okay, because Daniel Tosh makes fun of ALL people: women, men, AIDS victims, dead babies, gay guys, blah blah blah" - falls apart when you remember (as so many of us are forced to all the time) that all people are not in equal positions of power. "Oh, don't worry - I punch everyone in the face! People, baby ducks, a lion, this Easter Island statue, the ocean…" Okay, well that baby duck is dead now. ~ Lindy West

His eyes narrowed to menacing slits. "But that doesn't mean that if you refuse my offer and stay, I'll stand by and let you have her. I won't. In the end you'll lose, and you won't even have the consolation of my gold." He took his foot off the chair and leaned forward, planting his hands on the table as he eyed Petey with suspicion. "Why all the questions, Hargraves? You'd give up any hope of riches and adventure just to marry Miss Willis?"
"No, of course not," Petey said hastily, before the pirate's suspicions could be truly roused. "You can be sure I'd prefer this scepter and the chance to be off this island to Miss Willis any day." He paused, weighing his words. "I just don't understand why you don't feel the same."
Captain Horn drew himself up with the bearing of one of those nobles he so distained. "That's none of your concern. Do you want the thing or not? Because if you don't - " he broke off as he reached for the scepter.
Petey jerked it back. "I want it." He wasn't sure if he was playing this right, but it didn't look as if he had any choice.
"I want it. I'll be off your island tomorrow."
For a moment, Petey could have sworn he saw relief in the captain's face. Then the man's expression hardened. "One more thing - you're not to speak to her of any of this, you understand? You must promise to leave tomorrow without a word to her. ~ Sabrina Jeffries

I forgave her, of course. I always did; I had to, because there were only the two of us. The two of us on our thorn-encircled island, waiting for rescue; and, on the mainland, everyone else. ~ Margaret Atwood

Even corpses had purpose, or could be given one. A man could make himself an island his entire life, only to have reason itself laid about him, a fabricated existence. Identity became relative, history nonexistent. As they said, dead men told no tales. ~ Chris Galford

Do you know," he said, "it's twenty years since you wrote Notes from a Small Island?" (This was my first book about Britain. It did awfully well there.) "Twenty years?" I replied, amazed at how much past one can accumulate without any effort at all. ~ Bill Bryson

In this first testing ground of the atomic bomb I have seen the most terrible and frightening desolation in four years of war. It makes a blitzed Pacific island seem like an Eden. The damage is far greater than photographs can show. ~ Wilfred Burchett

...he is caught by the urgency of departure, as if this island were not good enough.

p 133 ~ Alison Anderson

We were each our own island, gathered together into one messed-up archipelago. ~ Melissa Albert

Jakatakan. Ancient isle. The mythical island beyond the Riders.' She addressed the others. 'But not so mythical, yes?'
'Until they came,' breathed Sister Esa.
'And what name did they come bearing?' Sister Gosh demanded.
'The name of the Island of the House of Death,' said Totsin.
'Malaz,' said Carfin, facing outward to the night.
'They are coming,' affirmed Sister Gosh. ~ Ian C. Esslemont

In putting setting to work, I like to think about long shots and close-ups. The long shot is the overall view of the place in which the characters live - the island, the town, the wide sweep of place. Then we narrow in. The close-up, the tight focus, makes the place different from anywhere else. ~ Kaui Hart Hemmings