Islands Quotes - Page 32

• The poet who writes "free" verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor - dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor.

  W. H. Auden

  Dirty, Writing, Cooking

  "The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays" by W. H. Auden, ("Writing"), (p. 22), 1962.

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• The power of reading a great book is that you start thinking like the author. For those magical moments while you are immersed in the forests of Arden, you are William Shakespeare; while you are shipwrecked on Treasure Island, you are Robert Louis Stevenson; while you are communing with nature at Walden, you are Henry David Thoreau. You start to think like they think, feel like they feel, and use imagination as they would. Their references become your own, and you carry these with you long after you've turned the last page.

  Tony Robbins

  Book, Reading, Thinking

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• Not once or twice in our rough island story, The path of duty was the way to glory.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  Stories, Way, Path

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Professor Norman Page (2013). “Tennyson: Selected Poetry”, p.115, Routledge

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• In the vast archipelago of the east, where Borneo and Java and Sumatra lie, and the Molucca Islands, and the Philippines, the sea is often fanned only by the land and sea breezes, and is like a smooth bed, on which these islands seem to sleep in bliss,--islands in which the spice and perfume gardens of the world are embowered, and where the bird of paradise has its home, and the golden pheasant, and a hundred others of brilliant plumage, whose flight is among thickets so luxuriant, and scenery so picturesque, that European strangers find there the fairy land of their youthful dreams.

  Frederick Marryat

  Dream, Lying, Home

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• the way with Ireland is that no sooner do you get away from her than the golden mists begin to close about her, and she lies, an Island of the Blest, something enchanted in our dreams. When you come back you may think you are disillusioned, but you know well that the fairy mists will begin to gather about her once more.

  Katharine Tynan

  Dream, Lying, Thinking

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• There is a place where the human enters dream and myth, and becomes a part of it, or maybe it is the other way around when the story grows from the body and spirit of humankind. In any case, we are a story, each of us, a bundle of stories, some as false as phantom islands but believed in nevertheless. Some might be true.

  Linda Hogan

  Dream, Stories, Body

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• Reached only by boat, seaplane and, with less surety, telephone-this is Fire Island, a pile of sand beneath a pile of people.

  Al Aronowitz

  Fire, Civilization, People

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• No man is an island unto himself.

  John Donne

  Men

  John Donne (2006). “A Sermon of Commemoration of the Lady Danvers, Late Wife of Sr. John Danvers (1627)”, Scholars Facsimilies & Reprint

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• As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information.

  Freeman Dyson

  Thinking, Sea, Information

  Freeman Dyson (2015). “Dreams of Earth and Sky”, p.206, New York Review of Books

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• Most days I feel like the sole survivor of a shipwreck, rowing my paddleboat across a sea of people on waves made of an infinite array of hands and crests that reveal anonymous faces. On a good day, the clouds part to alight on-lo and behold-an island! I step ashore, only find that it too is made of people, mangled bodies somehow still alive. They grab at my feet, pulling me under like quicksand. The last thing I see before suffocating is the sky, a billion eyes staring down, blinking in undulating electric ripples. The cold rain I feel on my cheeks is the tears of the people.

  Richard M. Nixon

  Rain, Good Day, Eye

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• Everyone asks about gold. This is the irony: just as Jim Grant tells us (correctly) that we all have faith-based paper currencies backed by nothing, it is equally fair to say that gold is a faith-based metal. It pays no dividend, cannot be eaten, and is mostly used for nothing more useful than jewelry. I would say that anything of which 75% sits idly and expensively in bank vaults is, as a measure of value, only one step up from the Polynesian islands that attached value to certain well-known large rocks that were traded.

  Jeremy Grantham

  Rocks, Gold, Paper

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• A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne's theorem that "No man is an island," but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man.

  Philip K. Dick

  Mistake, Fall, Mean

  "The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick". Book by Lawrence Sutin, 1995.

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• In order to enter into a real knowledge of your condition, consider it in this image: A man was cast by a tempest upon an unknown island, the inhabitants of which were in trouble to find
  their king, who was lost; and having a strong resemblance both in form and face to this king, he was taken for him, and acknowledged in this capacity by all the people.

  Blaise Pascal

  Strong, Kings, Real

  Blaise Pascal (2007). “Blaise Pascal: Thoughts, Letters, and Minor Works”, p.382, Cosimo, Inc.

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• In all things I would have the island of a man inviolate. Let us sit apart as the gods, talking from peak to peak all round Olympus. No degree of affection need invade this religion.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Talking, Degrees

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.522, Library of America

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• Consider the islands bearing the names of all the saints, bristling with forts like chestnut-burs, or Echinidæ, yet the police will not let a couple of Irishmen have a private sparring- match on one of them, as it is a government monopoly; all the great seaports are in a boxing attitude, and you must sail prudently between two tiers of stony knuckles before you come to feel the warmth of their breasts.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Couple, Attitude, Sea

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• Is it what you call civilization that makes England flourish? Is it the universal development of the faculties of man that has rendered an island, almost unknown to the ancients, the
  arbiter of the world? Clearly not. It is the inhabitants that have done this. It is an affair of race.... All is race, there is no other truth.

  Benjamin Disraeli

  Men, Race, Civilization

  Benjamin Disraeli (1847). “Tancred: Or, The New Crusade”, p.169

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• From the peak of Chimborazo (volcano) to the Pacific coast, from the Amazon rainforest to the Galapagos Islands, may you never lose the ability to thank God for what he has done and is doing for you, may you never lose the ability to protect what is small and simple, to care for your children and your elderly, to have confidence in the young, and to be constantly struck by the nobility of your people and the singular beauty of your country.

  Pope Francis

  Confidence, Country, Children

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• Ireland is a small but insuppressible island half an hour nearer the sunset than Great Britain.

  Tom Kettle

  Sunset, Half, Hours

  Tom Kettle (1918). “The day's burden: studies, literary & political and miscellaneous essays”

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• In truth I suspect that merely slowing down is not a very satisfying answer. What I need has less to do with my pace of life than my peace of life. At any speed, I crave a deep and lasting inner peace. And if it's solace I'm after, I don't need to pace myself like a turtle, change jobs or set up house on a quiet island. It is usually frenetic living, not high energy, that robs my peace of mind.

  Steve Goodier

  Jobs, Turtles, House

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• It is our duty to preserve huge tracts of land in something resembling its native condition. The biological interactions necessary to insure the continuities of life are astonishingly complex, and cannot take place in islands of semiwilderness like the national parks.

  William Kittredge

  Continuity Of Life, Environmental, National Parks

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• Both of my parents were born into poor families on the island of Cuba. They came to America because it was the only place where people like them could have a chance.My father was a bartender. And the journey from the back of that bar to the [election 2016], to me, that is the essence of the American dream.

  Marco Rubio

  Dream, Father, Journey

  GOP Debate, www.cbsnews.com. August 07, 2015.

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• Go to the east shore of any of the Hawaiian Islands, and that's a pretty big lesson on how much plastic is ending up in the ocean. Basically, the Hawaiian Islands act as a filter out in the middle of the Pacific.

  Jack Johnson

  Ocean, Filters, East

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• Stories have a tendency to seep across the shining membrane walls separating the universes. They whisper and flutter like the feathers of birds, from island to mainland and back again. They fall into dreams like rain.

  Kelly Barnhill

  Dream, Wall, Fall

  Kelly Barnhill (2012). “Iron Hearted Violet”, p.70, Hachette UK

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• The purpose of ritual is to change the mind of the human being. It's a sacred drama in which you are the audience as well as the participant, and the purpose of it is to activate the parts of the mind that are not activated by everyday activity ... 'Magic' becomes the development of techniques that allow communication with hidden portions of the self, and with hidden portions of all other islands in this 'psychic sea.'

  Margot Adler

  Drama, Communication, Sea

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• Friendship is an island that you retreat to and you all fall on the floor and laugh at all the other ninnies that don't have enough brains to have your good taste.

  Ray Bradbury

  Fall, Laughing, Brain

  "Ray Bradbury's Lost Interview On Madmen, Writing, and Cars" by Chris Higgins, mentalfloss.com. April 28, 2015.

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