#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

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

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

— George Borrow

#countries #islands #known #less #than

I love giving gifts and I love receiving them. I really like giving little kids extravagant gifts. You see their little faces light up and they get excited. If it's a really good gift, I love receiving it, like jewels, small islands. ↗

— Gina Gershon

#excited #extravagant #faces #get #gift

In front of us lay a smooth sandy beach, beyond which rose gradually a high wooded country, and behind us was the sea, studded with numerous islands of every variety of form. ↗

— George Grey

#behind #beyond #country #every #form

I hope that the residents of my current district - from Quincy to Provincetown and the Islands - know that their well-being is my primary concern and nothing changes that. ↗

— William R. Keating

#concern #current #district #hope #i

My goal is to be living back in Canada as soon as I can, hopefully somewhere in the Gulf Islands. ↗

— Nicholas Lea

#canada #goal #gulf #hopefully #i