"My grandfather was a cop in Long Island. I often try to draw on things that I've heard about him."
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Islands quotes
Islands
917 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Islands quotes (page 5 of 46)
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"I stayed with them for about a year up there and, at night, worked over in Long Island at a club called The High Hat Club which was like a pseudo jazz / blues place."
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"That island of England breeds very valiant creatures; their mastiffs are of unmatchable courage."
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"Sometime we will have to stop overevaluating the word. We shall learn to realize that it is only one of the many bridges that connect the island of our soul with the great continent of common life. . . the broadest, perhaps, but in no way the most refined."
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"The known is finite, the unknown infinite; spiritually we find ourselves on a tiny island in the middle of a boundless ocean of the inexplicable. It is our task, from generation to generation, to drain a small amount of additional land."
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"At any given time, there are a lot of million-dollar luxury charter boats cruising around the Mentawai Islands finding the most incredible waves. And yet the people on shore are suffering. The whole scene is wrong. As a surf community, we have to do something."
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"From the sprinkled isles, Lily on lily, that o'erlace the sea."
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"Independence, like honor, is a rocky island, without a beach."
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"I will get married when I build a house in Banana Island"
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"The Japanese invaded Tulagi, in the Solomon Islands, on May 4."
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"Your grandparents did not endure the indignities of a steerage journey to Ellis Island so that you could stand outside a discothèque and beg a wallpaper designer to take you in with him."
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"The wise man makes an island of himself that no flood can overwhelm."
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"For those struggling in midstream, in great fear of the flood, of growing old and of dying for all those I say, an island exists where there is no place for impediments, no place for clinging: the island of no going beyond. I call it nirvana, the complete destruction of old age and dying."
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"By what a delicate and far-stretched contribution every island is made! What an enterprise of nature thus to lay the foundations of and to build up the future continent, of golden and silver sands and the ruins of forests, with ant-like industry."
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"Most religion-mongers have bated their paradises with a bit of toasted cheese. They have tempted the body with large promises of possessions in their transmortal El Dorado. Sancho Panza will not quit his chimney-corner, but under promise of imaginary islands to govern."
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"How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains! To behold this alone is worth the pains of any excursion a thousand times over. The highest peaks burned like islands in a sea of liquid shade. Then the lower peaks and spires caught the glow, and long lances of light, streaming through many a notch and pass, fell thick on the frozen meadows."
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"I judge property myself by its net earning power; that is the only rule I have been able to get.... This whole island [Manhattan] was once bought for a few strings of beads. But now you will find this property valued by its earning power, by its rent power, and that is the way to value a railroad or telegraph."
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"She became for me an island of light, fun, wisdom where I could run with my discoveries and torments and hopes at any time of day and find welcome."
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"I'm not a big Austen reader. I wouldn't say I dislike her, but if I had to choose between her and Eliot to bring to a desert island, it would definitely be Eliot."
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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."
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