island quotes

  •    I remember when our whole island was shaken with an earthquake some years ago, there was an impudent mountebank who sold pills which (as he told the country people) were very good against an earthquake.

    -Joseph Addison
      In The Tatler, no.240, 21 Oct.

  • Possibly the symbol for America is the Frontier† The corresponding symbol for England is the Island† The central symbol for Canada†is undoubtedly Survival, la Survivance.

    - Margaret Eleanor Atwood
      Survival: a Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, ch.1, 'Survival'.

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

    - Sir (Henry) Max(imilian) Beerbohm
    Zuleika Dobson, ch.2.

  • We shall not flag or fail.We shall go on to the end.We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island whatever the cost may be.We shall fight on the beaches, weshall fight onthelanding grounds, weshall fight inthe fields and in thestreets, we shall fight inthehills.We shall never surrender.

    - Lord Randolph Henry Spencer Churchill
      Speech in the House of Commons,4  Jun, after the Dunkirk evacuation.

  • This island rock in space turns flowering endlessly To peaks of cloud still mounting where you took Your last high passage and your faltering luck.

    -Cicero full name MarcusTullius Cicero
      'Elegy for Kurt Porjescz, Missing in  Action,1  April,1945'.

  • If it was ever intended that I should go across salt water, doyou suppose Providence would have cast my lot inan island?

    - CharlesJohn Huffam Dickens
      Miss Pross.  A  Tale of  Two Cities, bk.1, ch.4.

  • No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

    -John Donne
      Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation no.17.

  •    And as the moon rose higher the unessential houses begantomelt awayuntilgradually Ibecameaware ofthe old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyesa fresh, green breast of the new world† For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

    - F(rancis) Scott Key Fitzgerald
      The Great Gatsby, ch.9.

  • Here is the heart of our island: the Chilterns, the North Downs, the South Downs radiate hence. The fibres of England unite in Wiltshire, and did we condescend to worship her, here should we erect our national shrine.

    - E(dward) M(organ) Forster
      The Longest  Journey, ch.13.

  • From the lone shieling of the misty island Mountains divide us, and the waste of seas Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland, And we in dreams behold the Hebrides! Fair these broad meads, these hoary woods are grand; But we are exiles from our fathers' land.

    -John Galt
      'Canadian Boat Song', a translation from the Gaelic attributed to Galt, published in Blackwood's Magazine, Sep. It has also been attributed to Walter Scott.

  • Then, beneath the nine-tailed cat Shall they who use it writhe, sir; And curates lean, and rectors fat, Shall dig the ground they tithe, sir. Down with your Bayleys, and your Bests, Your Giffords, and your Gurneys; We'll clear the island of the pests, Which mortals name attorneys.

    -1st Baron
      'A Radical War Song', stanza 8. The names are those of lawyers and judges who figured in the trial of the Cato Street conspirators.

  •    The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.

    -Joseph MacInnis
    Quoted by Donald Grant in The Globe and Mail, 8 Nov1986.

  • Away with systems! Away with a corrupt world! Let us breathe the air of the Enchanted island.Golden lie the meadows; golden run the streams; red gold is on the pine-stems. The sun's coming down to earth, and walks the fields and the waters. The sun is coming down to earth, and the fields and the waters shout to him golden shouts.

    - George Meredith
      The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, ch.19.

  • Jeder Engl a« nder ist eine Insel. Every Englishman is an island.

    -Novalis pseudonym of  Friedrich von Hardenberg
      Schriften, II, Fragmente.

  • Theactionoftheplay takesplace onanisland intheWest Indies as not yet self-determined by White Mariners. The form of native government is, for the time being, an Empire.

    - Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
      The Emperor Jones, scene direction.

  • Just seehow well shegoverns! She is onlya woman, only the mistress of half an island, and yet she makes herself feared by Spain, by France, by the Empire, byall!

    -SixtusV originally Felice Peretti
      Of Elizabeth I. Quoted in L von Pastor The History of the Popes (edited by Kerr R F,1932), vol.22, p.34.

  • In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland, At the sea-down's edge between windward and lee, Walled round with rocks as an inland island, The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.

    - Algernon Charles Swinburne
      Poems and Ballads (2nd edn),'A Forsaken Garden'.

  • And little Revengeherself went down by the island crags To be lost evermore in the main.

    -Tennyson
      'The Revenge', stanza14, l.118^19.

  • Unless we change our ways and our direction, our greatness as a nation will soon be a footnote in the history books, a distant memory of an offshore island, lost in the mist of time like Camelot, remembered kindly for its noble past.

    - Margaret HildaThatcher, Baroness Thatcher
      General election campaign speech, Bolton, 2 May.

  • Your daughters, I hope, will be married to Americans, and not in this dirty, despicable little island.

    - Horace, 4th Earl of Orford Walpole
      Letter to Lady Ossory,11 Dec. InW S Lewis (ed) Selected Letters of HoraceWalpole (1973).

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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