#islands

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. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#insulation #islands #isolation #life #originality

The Japanese invaded Tulagi, in the Solomon Islands, on May 4. ↗

— Jack Adams

#islands #japanese #may #solomon

On December 5, 1941, Chicago led a task force built around the carrier Lexington to Midway Island, at the western end of the Hawaiian Islands, about 1,000 miles from Pearl Harbor. ↗

— Jack Adams

#around #built #carrier #chicago #december

Our task force put to sea in early January 1942, to attack the Japanese in the Marshall and Gilbert islands, but the mission was called off on the eve of the attack. ↗

— Jack Adams

#called #early #eve #force #gilbert

The good news was that Enterprise and the newly arrived Yorktown had attacked the Marshall and Gilbert islands. Those attacks had a great effect on morale. ↗

— Jack Adams

#attacked #attacks #effect #enterprise #gilbert

More varied than any landscape was the landscape in the sky, with islands of gold and silver, peninsulas of apricot and rose against a background of many shades of turquoise and azure. ↗

— Cecil Beaton

#any #background #gold #islands #landscape

In the islands of the Aegean Sea, every island is full of graves. ↗

— James Theodore Bent

#full #graves #island #islands #sea

If the people of New Zealand want to be part of our world, I believe they should hop off their islands, and push 'em closer. ↗

— Lewis Black

#closer #hop #i #i believe #islands

I cannot lead you into battle. I do not give you laws or administer justice but I can do something else - I can give my heart and my devotion to these old islands and to all the peoples of our brotherhood of nations. ↗

— Elizabeth II

#administer #battle #brotherhood #cannot #devotion

There are no countries in the world less known by the British than those selfsame British Islands. ↗

— George Borrow

#countries #islands #known #less #than