Hawai'i is not truly the idyllic paradise of popular songs--islands of love and tranquility, where nothing bad ever happens. It was and is a place where people work and struggle, live and die, as they do the world over.
I come from a little island with the Caribbean Sea on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. I come from, really, nowhere, and for me, the fiction and the nonfiction, creative or otherwise, all come from the same place.
I am very attracted by the mysterious landscape of Easter Island. Not only because it is a piece of land that is further away from another, but also because of the beautiful statues of Moai that are there. To do a beautiful walk there, I would have to involve the Moai, and the Rapa Nui people who live on the island.
Sometimes my life has been Odyssean - landing on strange islands of consciousness and reality and meeting very curious monsters who turn out to be very great teachers. Sometimes my life has been a quest for a grail of knowledge and education. Like Parsifal, my life has been a quest to pierce the veil, stumbling along but eventually finding it.
Here's my proposal, which is based on the TV show Survivor: We put the entire Congress on an island. All the food on this island is locked inside a vault, which can be opened only by an ordinary American taxpayer named Bob. Every day, the congresspersons are given a section of the Tax Code, which they must rewrite so that Bob can understand it. If he can, he lets them eat that day; if he can't, he doesn't.
Gilligan's Island is wherever you want it to be in your mind.
I can't say, maybe it's something in the ingredients, but again, we have a couple of contestants from Long Island and a phenomenal array of chefs.
Not to leave planet Earth would be like castaways on a desert island not trying to escape. . . Sending humans to other planets. . . will shape the future of the human race in ways we don't yet understand, and may determine whether we have any future at all.
You can make all the changes to the island of the tonal you want, you can take excursions into the nagual, but to push yourself into the reordering process is absolutely foolish.
Once we were happy in our own country and we were seldom hungry, for then the two-leggeds and the four-leggeds lived together like relatives, and there was plenty for them and for us. But the Wasichus came, and they have made little islands for us and other little islands for the four-leggeds, and always these islands are becoming smaller, for around them surges the gnawing flood of the Wasichu; and it is dirty with lies and greed.
In my district, the budget scales back and eliminates several long-term shore protection projects important to the safety and economic security of Long Island.
Donald Westlake's Parker novels are among the small number of books I read over and over. Forget all that crap you've been telling yourself about War and Peace and Proust-these are the books you'll want on that desert island.
Transcendental Meditation gives me an island of calm in the midst of so much turbulence.
Sri Lanka is a small island, and the war affected everybody. Everybody knew somebody who was killing or being killed.
Like other systems in decay, the Roman Empire continued to function for several generations after its vitality was sapped. For nearly a hundred years our Island was one of the scenes of conflict between a dying civilisation and lusty, famishing barbarism.
Island of Hispaniola once so populous (having a population that I estimated to be more than three million), has now a population of barely two hundred persons.
Artificial Intelligence leaves no doubt that it wants its audiences to enter a realm of pure fantasy when it identifies one of the last remaining islands of civilization as New Jersey.
Piper to Drew: P: In case youthink Im not a true Daughter of Aphrodite dont even look at Jason Grace. He may not know it yet but he’s mine. If you even try to make a move, I will load you into a catapult and shoot you across Long Island Sound.
I'm one of relatively few stage-trained actors who doesn't much like acting on stage. It feels kind of like riding the Cyclone at Coney Island, which I did when I was eight. When it was all over, I was glad I had done it, but most of the time when it was actually happening, I was just kind of hanging on for dear life.
If September 11th has taught us anything, it's certainly that the world has never been so interdependent. It is impossible now to be an island of prosperity in a sea of despair.