Island Life Quotes

“If you are not from an island.
you cannot understand
what it means to be of water:

to learn to curve around the bend,
to learn to rise with rain,
to learn to quench an outside thirst

while all the while
you grow shallow
until there is not one drop

left for you.

I know this is what Tia does not say.
Sand & soil & sinew & smiles:
all bartered. & who reaps? Who eats?

Not us. Not me.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Clap When You Land

“...two bitches livin on a little chunk of rock...”
― Stephen King, Dolores Claiborne

“The sunsets here were always deep, passionate, and rich - always colors Camila thought she could take a shovel to and dig at for days.”
― Kyle Labe, Butterflies Behind Glass & Other Stories

“Of course often those places went very cheap - islands didn't suit everybody. They thought the idea was romantic but when they came to live there they realised the disadvantages and were only too glad to sell.”
― Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None

“The bright blue sky remained cloudless, and the aquamarine ocean still crashed gently onto the white sand beach, but the scene was suddenly warped. Twisted, as I processed Thad's words.”
― Lynne Matson, Nil

“It was the magic that music makes, the song that lives within every creature on earth, including mermaids.”
― Monique Roffey, The Mermaid of Black Conch

“That's something every islander knows--there's always going to be another hurricane. Another storm. Everything buried will surface again, and everything you thought would last forever will come down eventually. But you rebuild. You dredge. You keep moving, keep adding new. That's how we go on living.”
― Roseanna M. White, Yesterday's Tides

“The air is sharp, and I understand why years ago sea air was prescribed as a tonic for the body.”
― Anita Shreve, The Weight of Water

“She'd lived a lot of years on this tiny little island, a dot in the Atlantic. Home to pirates, home to ships' captains, home to innkeepers and fishermen and Coasties. Home to generations of stubborn people determined to stand, though the sands may shift. To thrive, though the waters may rise. To go on living, though the storms may rage.”
― Roseanna M. White, Yesterday's Tides

“Pourtant, il n'y a jamais rien qui change et j'ai parfois l'impression de vivre dans une dimension parallèle où ce qui se passe ici ne traverse jamais l'océan et n'atteint jamais personne. Nous sommes seuls.”
― Nathacha Appanah, Tropique de la violence

“D'en haut et de loin, c'est vrai que ce n'est qu'une poussière ici mais cette poussière existe, elle est quelque chose. Quelque chose avec son envers et son endroit, son soleil et son ombre, sa vérité et son mensonge. Les vies sur cette terre valent autant que les vies sur les autres terres, n'est-ce pas ?”
― Nathacha Appanah, Tropique de la violence

“Although there are some conflicting stories regarding the discoveries of the mid-Atlantic islands, it is safe to assume that in 1501 João da Nova discovered Ascension Island. The desolate island remained deserted until it was rediscovered two years later on Ascension Day by Alfonso de Albuquerque. He was also the first European to discover the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf.
The last time I was on Ascension Island I went to “The Pan American Club” which was the Island Pub. There were a few locals drinking at the bar but outside was a donkey looking for something to drink, which the locals gladly provided. It didn’t take much, and after a few bottles of beer the donkey fell down in a drunken stupor. It was the only time in my life that I actually saw a drunken ass! (True story!)”
― Captain Hank Bracker, "Salty & Saucy Maine",

“I like kittens, too, but she must've gone hunting this morning and left them hungry, because at about four a.m., I could hear all this pitiful meowing that went on forever. I wanted to feed them so bad I nearly started lactating.”
― Tracy Brogan, My Kind of Perfect

“If you haven't been to Barbados, you haven't been to heaven.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“I’ll take care of them. I do a bit of pest control, on the side.’ ‘Didn’t you say you do plastering on the side?’ He cocked an eyebrow. ‘There’s a lot of “on the side” when you live on an island.”
― C J Cooke

“You have to take things with a grain of salt on a small island.”
― Sol Luckman, Musings from a Small Island: Everything under the Sun

“It seemed unlikely that she’d leave the island again in her lifetime, she thought, not only because of the state of her finances but mostly because of the way she felt rooted here, like she grew out of the green grass”
― Emma Seckel

“The gray-blue water, the patchwork of sandy and rocky shore--- it was breathtaking. I had the urge to run out there right at that moment and dig for clams, or lift up rocks and look for crabs, or strip down and swim to the buoy the way I had done in the summers of my childhood. I wanted to immerse myself in that big, beautiful, mysterious body of water.”
― Sarah Jio, The Violets of March