{"quotes":[{"text":"The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the pain in the world had found a voice. Yet had I known such pain was in the next room, and had it been dumb, I believe—I have thought since—I could have stood it well enough. It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us. But in spite of the brilliant sunlight and the green fans of the trees waving in the soothing sea-breeze, the world was a confusion, blurred with drifting black and red phantasms, until I was out of earshot of the house in the stone wall.","author":"H.G. Wells","tags":["fear","horror","islands","pity","vivisection"],"id":45920,"author_id":"H.G.+Wells"},{"text":"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.","author":"Andrew Rayner","tags":["adventure","islands","ocean","pacific","pacific-islands","pacific-ocean-ocean","sailing","sea"],"id":83130,"author_id":"Andrew+Rayner"},{"text":"You are to me like white islands, in a world of vast darkness.","author":"Charlotte Eriksson","tags":["darkness","happiness","happy","islands","letter","litquote","love","love-letter","me","poetry","prose","quote","the-glass-child","you"],"id":99422,"author_id":"Charlotte+Eriksson"},{"text":"Word has traveled quickly that just because you're on island doesn't mean you have to be stranded---as long as you have cash.","author":"Doug Cooper","tags":["cash","identity","islands","outside-in","stranded"],"id":145408,"author_id":"Doug+Cooper"},{"text":"No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes—forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection), but still unique.","author":"Neil Gaiman","tags":["hope","insulation","islands","isolation","life","originality","tragedy"],"id":174525,"author_id":"Neil+Gaiman"},{"text":"Why slum it where people were burdened by yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that? By history? Here, on the Island, they had learnt how to deal with history, how to sling it carelessly on your back and stride out across the download with the breeze in your face.","author":"Julian Barnes","tags":["history","islands","past"],"id":205989,"author_id":"Julian+Barnes"},{"text":"You don’t rewrite it, censor it, or edit it, to suit some warped view you have of the past and your own present.","author":"V.T. Davy","tags":["arty","censor","channel","crime","detective","edit","history","islands","nazi","past","present","rewrite","shaw","stasi"],"id":212236,"author_id":"V.T.+Davy"},{"text":"Therefore, men of Polynesia and Boston and China and Mount Fuji and the barrios of the Philippines, do not come to these islands empty-handed, or craven in spirit, or afraid to starve. There is no food here. In these islands there is no certainty. Bring your own food, your own gods, your own flowers and fruits and concepts. For if you come without resources to these islands you will perish... On these harsh terms the islands waited.","author":"James A. Michener","tags":["islands","survival"],"id":244525,"author_id":"James+A.+Michener"},{"text":"Every island to a child is a treasure island.","author":"P.D. James","tags":["fantasy","islands"],"id":281626,"author_id":"P.D.+James"},{"text":"The physique of a Messiah. But too clever to believe in God or be convinced of his own mission. And too sensitive, even if he were convinced, to carry it out. His muscles would like to act and his feelings would like to believe; but his nerve-endings and his cleverness won't allow it.","author":"Aldous Huxley","tags":["islands","opposition","spirituality"],"id":288408,"author_id":"Aldous+Huxley"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":19,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}