Azores Island Quotes

There is a Portuguese word, saudade, that they say has no translation. It’s bigger than homesickness or missing someone. It’s a yearning that can be expressed in no other language. It is, as one Azorean friend puts it, “a strictly Portuguese word.

Home—it seemed like a fragile idea to me. Is it where we’re from or where we are?

America has long been divided between those who believe its strength lies in diversity and those who are afraid of outsiders and blame social ills on whoever is in the latest wave of migrants.

Well, Jack, we have taken the Macedonian, and your share of the prize, if we get her in safely, may be two hundred dollars; what will you do with it?” Stephen Decatur, commanding the frigate United States, North Atlantic, near the Azores Islands, 1812. “One hundred will go to my mother, sir, and the other I shall spend on schooling.” Jack Creamer, aged ten.

marriage works best when people live in separate countries.

Maria was amazed to learn that he had been in the Azores, where she had lived until she was eleven. She was doubly amazed that he had been in the Hawaiian Islands, whither she had migrated from the Azores with her people.

Among the many spots used by philosophers and astronomers over the centuries to mark the meridian for zero degrees longitude were Ferro, in the Canary Islands; Ujjain, in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh; the “agonic line” (a line along which true north and magnetic north coincide, but not forever) that passed through the Azores; the Paris Observatory; the Royal Observatory at Greenwich; the White House; and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.

He pulled a battered red photo album from his truck’s glove compartment and showed me pictures of green Azorean fields divided by hedges of lilac-colored hydrangeas. He showed me waves crashing against black volcanic rock and his ancient stone house next to the sea, the home where he returned every summer. “Over there the air is so clean, so nice. The ocean is right there. The fish are fresh, you catch and eat them, and the potatoes are so good, you won’t believe it. “We make wine. Put on shorts and get in there and smash grapes, and when you drink right away is sweet like juice. Every year when we get back from there, we’re fat,” Morais said. He loved his island house in the Azores so much that at the end of each summer, when he left, he had to have someone else close the door for him. “I’m a guy that came from the old country. I never go to school five minutes in this country, and still I work and I do good. I love my money. God bless this country,” he said. “But when I leave to close my door over there, I cry like a baby. I try so hard not to, but I cry.

It had been a tumultuous week, and it occurred to me that in all levels of crisis, it is a good idea to lie down outside and look up.

When you go on an adventure, just trust that you’ll meet who you need to meet and hear what you need to hear because the really important stuff, you just can’t plan.

For all our talk about living in the moment, what makes the present beautiful and complete is also imagining what we will do next.

Almost anything you do will be insignificant, but you must do it . . . We do these things not to change the world, but so that the world will not change us.

It was the reason I liked immigration stories: place and separation and identity and figuring out what stayed put even when you didn’t.

I have thought about a DNA test. But I don’t like the idea, because I think it shouldn’t matter. I’m a proponent of a one-race sorting system: human.

The humidity keeps the hills a rich green and means that a wildfire won’t burn, but it can be hard on pudding-headed sorts overly concerned with the texture of their hair. Like me. Redheads are vulnerable to such worries. We’re conditioned to believe that there’s only a few flyaway hairs’ difference between siren and Pippi Longstocking, Little Orphan Annie, or Witchiepoo.

THE PAPER-CUT THEORY This theory holds that the tiny cuts made by bad bosses, broken romances, and the like sting more than real grief. It’s the difference between a deep throbbing wound and a paper cut. Our fingers have more nerves near the surface because that’s how we explore the world. So it hurts like hell when paper slices us. At the same time, scientists believe that our bodies know it’s not really life-threatening, so all the natural protective mechanisms, such as endorphins and bleeding, don’t kick into gear. And since paper is microscopically ragged, it leaves a jagged cut. Unlike the clean slice of a razor, which can kill us.

THE IMPORTANCE OF DAWDLING THEORY This theory holds that there is nothing more valuable than time to waste. The most interesting things are the ones tucked in the empty spaces to be discovered when dawdling, loitering, lying in bed. It’s the only part of the universe you can truly call your own.

Stories almost always begin with a person at their low point.

The world is a small place, and the currents can carry anyone anywhere.

The Tenth Island is what you carry inside you. It’s what’s left when everything else falls away. Those of us who live between worlds just know the Tenth Island better. No matter where I have lived—I have never left my island.

Just being here, at ease, alone in the dark, made me realize I had been mindlessly maneuvering just-the-way-things-are, accepting that violence was always a possibility, never realizing there are other places where it doesn’t feel that way. Of course, my dad had a saying for this: “They might have a different way of doing things across the river.” Or in this case, the middle of the ocean. I liked the idea of my own, personal Tenth Island, made only of things I wanted to keep. I’d start by carrying inside me a place where a desk clerk looked confused when a woman asked where it was safe for her to walk alone.

The ocean floor had identifiable formations such as the continental shelf near the continents' landmass. Here it is generally thought of as that part of the continent that is underwater. Perhaps it could be better thought of as that part that corresponds to the area of the mainland between the beach and the point where the continent falls off into the abyss. Other terms include the seabed, seafloor, sea floor, or ocean floor which is the bottom of the ocean. If this area were to be dry it would include many of the same features found on land, such as mountain ranges and flat plains. Some of these mountains penetrate the surface to become islands. The Hawaiian and Caribbean islands are examples of this. In the Atlantic Ocean the mid-Atlantic riff also has many examples such as Iceland, the Azores Madeira, Ascension Island and Saint Helena. These islands follow a seismic crack or fault line between adjacent tectonic plates. It runs 24,855 miles, mostly underwater, from the Polar Regions in both the northern and southern hemispheres. There is a concern that as more ice melts due to global warming some of the lands near the ocean, including entire islands, will relatively soon become flooded, Coastal Florida is definitely an area of concern, however politicians have not yet noticed! Usually a seabed describes the Seafloor and its characteristics such as the type of sediment, sand or stones covering it. Some scientists differentiate the Ocean floor from the Sea bottom, by the water over it such as that of an Ocean a Gulf or a Sea. Although it can be made to sound complicated these nouns are basically synonymous and in most cases can be used interchangeably.

part of an e. e. cummings poem—the closest thing to a hymn that I have memorized: i thank You God for most this amazing / day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees / and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything / which is natural which is infinite which is yes.

But São Jorge startled me. From the ferry it looked like a towering emerald fortress ringed by waterfalls. It was a steep, secretive island.

One thing is we spend most of our time with couples who like each other,” Elmano said. “Being around people who don’t like being married to each other can be contagious.

But a friend of mine whose husband died has a theory that there are four chambers in the human heart—so even if one belongs for eternity to someone missing, there is still room for love.

In California, every spring weekend, somewhere in a Portuguese community, they are dishing out free soup. It’s a deeply spiritual rite but not a Catholic one, something seldom realized.

Historians believe the Holy Spirit tradition began with Joachim, a monk born in Calabria circa 1135. He was the abbot of a monastery in Fiore, Italy. He came to believe that the Trinity—the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—represented different ages for humanity. The age of the Father was in the past, they were living in the age of the Son, and ahead was the age of the Holy Spirit, according to Joachim’s reading of Scripture.

Something my father always told me was that the trick to success is to know when you have enough and stop and appreciate it.

Gerald and I saw the Azore Islands, Talcahuano, Tumbez, San Francisco, and Nome from afar while the captain and officers rowed to shore for fresh food and fresh whalers. Even at Nome, not two days ago, Gerald and I watched the Alaskan town from the ship. We saw Talcahuano at night, the town alive with lights and torches. We heard music across the water. People celebrated an event on shore. We thought it might be a wedding. We imagined walking the clay, brick roads, ordering crabs and clams near the sea, sampling the local exotic fruits and plants growing in their vibrant colors and prickly skins, and of course, seducing the dark- skinned indigenous women emanating macadamia oil, musk, and leafy air. Merihim laughed at our children’s eyes and said to act like men, not like guttersnipes at a bakery window.

About two days after passing by Gibraltar, I was again mesmerized by two Azores islands we passed between. The one on the north side was covered with gloomy clouds and looked rugged, dark, and mysterious; the one facing it, on the south side, looked like an enchanted isle from a fable book, with countless terraced gardens climbing up a mountain, spotted by sparkling white houses and churches. Then, more ocean…

Carthage was a spider’s web of trade and communications that spread eastward to Egypt and the Levant, and westward as far as scarcely imaginable places beyond Spain. Where the Mediterranean issued between the giant Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar and Ceuta) into the misty Ocean that lapped the whole world round, the Carthaginians had planted trading posts. Their interests extended as far north as Britain and the Baltic, as well as to the Canary Islands, the Cameroons, and possibly even the Azores.

My dear, I've found 'em! They're here, every one of these nine Azores. Little islands full of prayers and shrines and vesper chimes, strung on a thread of water, like the decades in the windings of a Rosary of the Sea.

We have this one life. But all the roads not taken, all those other lives we might have lived, are a part of it too. Yearning—that terrible, beautiful gaping yawn of want for a person, a place, a chance, a change, or something we can’t name—leaves craters, spaces for us to hold more of life. Saudade might be a strictly Portuguese word, but aching want is a universal condition.

there are three routes to choose from. From Morocco, the Azores, or Senegal; the Cape Verde Islands, St. Paul Island, and Cayenne. Those are the routes most talked about at the start. They are favored because they are the farthest north and the most direct. I have a better, a least safer, idea.” “I’ll warrant you have, Dave, if it’s to be found,” declared Hiram. “What is it?” inquired Elmer. “The objection to those routes,” explained the young airman, “is that the water stretches are of wide extent. What I dread most is the fear of being caught away from land.” “Is there a shorter route than those you speak of?” asked Hiram. “Yes, there is,” asserted Dave. “What is it?” “Egypt, the Sahara Desert, the French Congo, Ascension Island, St. Helena, Trinidad, Rio Janeiro, and we are on American soil.” “Capital!” cried Hiram. “I wouldn’t lose an hour, Dave,” advised Elmer, with real anxiety. “Ever since we found out that there are two of the crowd ahead of us, it seems as if I’d be willing to sleep in the seat in the machine all the way to get ahead of them.” It was a warm, clear day when the Comet came to a rest at the city of Mayamlia, in French Congo. Looking back over the ten days consumed in making the run across Egypt, through Fezzan, the width of the great desert, over darkest Africa, and into the Soudan, the airship boys had viewed a country never before thus inspected by an aerial explorer. “Baked,

That night, after a hearty meal of sopas ladled out of huge pots and linguiça and Portuguese breads and cheeses,

I think they called them human-interest stories back then, when there was a belief that most humans shared a common interest in one another.

I wish I could figure out the rules that the universe follows for catching you when you jump off a cliff. There seems to be some sort of caveat that the life rafts won’t line up until after you’re hurtling through the air spread out for a belly flop.

DIVING BOARD NOTES Odie tells Albert, a friend the family knew back in Iran, that I had a cocktail party, and they met my Armenian writer friend, and she found him intelligent and smokin’ hot. Odie is perfectly fluent in English, but connotation can still trip her up. A while back, I told her that when Americans think someone is nice-looking, they say, “smokin’ hot.” Albert’s twenty-two-year-old son seated next to me whispers, “She thinks he’s smoking hot?” I whisper back, “She also thinks you and I are smoking hot. It’s her phrase.” Albert, on the other side of me, whispers, “You are smoking pot?” Patrick, across from me, listening through the din, says, “No, I don’t like smoking pot.” Armen, a little hard of hearing, says to Patrick, “You like smoking pot?!” Albert whispers to me, “Pot is not so bad. I like Scotch better.” Odie, oblivious to their side conversations, finishes her recounting with a flourish: “And he’s such a good writer!

We have this one life. But all the roads not taken, all those other lives we might have lived, are a part of it too.

when traveling, one should forget constant exploration. Go back to the same spots. You’ll be recognized as a familiar face and you’ll discover more.

the trick to success is to know when you have enough and stop and appreciate it.

had dated a pilot afraid of buttons. He’d been trapped in a duvet as a child. One friend of mine didn’t think this was a deal breaker, likening it to her mother’s aversion to plaid: “It makes her dizzy. She has to leave the room.” Then it came out that he didn’t like zippers either, and I realized he just wanted people to keep their clothes on.

Our next stop was Terceira’s surest shot for a tourist attraction: Algar do Carvão, probably the only known place in the world where you can walk inside the cone of a volcano. There was an initial explosion some three thousand two hundred years ago, and then two thousand years ago another eruption at the same site spewed molten lava inside the mountain. When the lava drained, it left chambers whose rock walls were as varied in colors of bronzes and golds as the cloak of the lover in the Gustav Klimt painting The Kiss.

come alive as the center of Holy Spirit festivals. It’s a celebration in which huge pots of soup and baskets of bread are served, a reminder to practice charity. The chapels are covered with fresh flowers, and each village forms a procession with young girls dressed as queens in white dresses and capes,

Almost anything you do will be insignificant, but you must do it . . . We do these things not to change the world, but so that the world will not change us.

THE IMPORTANCE OF DAWDLING THEORY

what makes the present beautiful and complete is also imagining what we will do next.

Recent archaeology finds suggest there may have been even earlier, unknown inhabitants who disappeared before the Portuguese arrived, raising the question of how people got to the middle of the ocean before the known advent of sailing ships.

Mark Twain mentioned the Azores in The Innocents Abroad but only to say, “Out of our whole ship’s company there was not a solitary individual who knew anything whatever about them.

Here’s to nothing,” he said. “That’s when anything can happen.

Infante Dom Henrique de Avis, Duke of Viseu, better known as Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal, was the fifth child of King John I. The prince was a responsible ruler and is remembered for developing Portugal’s trade routes with foreign countries, exploring the islands along the central spine of the Atlantic Ocean and sailing along the western coast of Africa in search of new trade routes to the Far East. The 15th century was exciting as well as dangerous. It was a time when exploring meant going to sea and discovering new lands inhabited by many people that were previously unknown to Europeans. The explorations started in about 1418, when two Portuguese ships were inadvertently driven off-course by a storm. The vessels grounded onto the island now known as Porto Santos. The captains, João Gonçalves Zarco and Tristão Vaz Teixeira, who had been commissioned by Prince Henry the Navigator, saw heavy clouds in the distance, under which lay the island of Madeira. Eight years later, Diogo de Silves discovered islands north of Madeira, now known as the Azores.

People still said that “The Sun Never Sets on the British Empire,” even though the Commonwealth was starting to come apart. In spite of the obvious, it was unthinkable that the United States had a colony in Africa; well they had one, and that was where I was headed! World War II had been over for ten years and in Europe they were getting on with things and for now all was well in Africa, and with the World! Unless especially fitted out, aircraft didn’t have the range to cross the Atlantic in one jump, so after leaving Idlewild Airport in New York City, we flew halfway across the Atlantic Ocean to the Portuguese island of Santa Maria in the Azores. After refueling and stretching our legs we continued on to Lisbon. Our layovers were only for as long as it took to take care of business. There were no days built in, for me to have a leisurely, gentlemanly, civilized journey to my destination. Instead my seat was beginning to feel as hard as a rock pile. The engines continued to drone on as the Atlantic Ocean eventually gave way to the Iberian Peninsula. My view of Portugal was only what I could see from the air and what was at the airport. Again we landed for fuel in Lisbon, and then without skipping a beat, headed south across the Mediterranean to the North African desert. The beaches under us, in Morocco and the Spanish Sahara, were endless and the sand went from the barren coastal surf inland, to as far as the eye could see. With very few exceptions there was no evidence of civilization.