Weekend Words: Island
It only took a half-century, but this week the United States restored diplomatic relations with the island nation 90 miles off its shoreline.
It only took a half-century, but this week the United States restored diplomatic relations with the island nation 90 miles off its shoreline.
“How I wish that somewhere there existed an island for those who are wise and of goodwill! In such a place even I would be an ardent patriot.”
—Albert Einstein
“Look, stranger, at this island now
The leaping light for your delight
discovers,
Stand stable here
And silent be,
That through channels of the ear
May wander like a river
The swaying sound of the sea.”
—W. H. Auden, Look, Stranger!
“Not in Utopia,—subterranean fields,—
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!
But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us,—the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all!”
—William Wordsworth, The Prelude
“Honor is like an island, rugged and without a beach; once we have left it, we can never return.”
—Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux
“This island of Manhattan is wide enough
for both of us, and narrow:
I can hear your breath tonight, I know how your face
lies upturned, the halflight tracing
your generous, delicate mouth
where grief and laughter sleep together.”
—Adrienne Rich, Twenty-One Love Poems, XIV
“We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.”
—John Archibald Wheeler
“We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
—H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
“It is not physical solitude that actually separates one from others; not physical isolation, but spiritual isolation. It is not the desert island nor the stony wilderness that cuts you from the people you love. It is the wilderness in the mind, the desert wastes in the heart through which one wanders lost and a stranger.”
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea
