Fiji Travel Quotes

Paradise was always over there, a day’s sail away. But it’s a funny thing, escapism. You can go far and wide and you can keep moving on and on through places and years, but you never escape your own life. I, finally, knew where my life belonged. Home.

People fear that being trapped inside a box, they will miss out on all the wonders of the world. As long as Neo is stuck inside the matrix, and Truman is stuck inside the TV studio, they will never visit Fiji, or Paris, or Machu Picchu. But in truth, everything you will ever experience in life is within your own body and your own mind. Breaking out of the matrix or travelling to Fiji won’t make any difference. It’s not that somewhere in your mind there is an iron chest with a big red warning sign ‘Open only in Fiji!’ and when you finally travel to the South Pacific you get to open the chest, and out come all kinds of special emotions and feelings that you can have only in Fiji. And if you never visit Fiji in your life, then you missed these special feelings for ever. No. Whatever you can feel in Fiji, you can feel anywhere in the world; even inside the matrix.

Sailors tended to collect things on their travels. His bosun kept a small box stuffed with plant seeds from foreign ports, a whole future garden in potentia; his carpenter kept a bag of heathen votives and shrunken heads. Curiosities, both natural and artificial, were difficult for wandering seamen to resist. One of the hands on Sparhawk’s first snow had found a giant clamshell on Fiji and brought it aboard. When his shipmates quizzed him on what he planned to do with it, he said he hadn’t the slightest idea—but he knew that he should regret leaving it behind.

If Kumar had his way they would leave for Fiji every year just before Thanksgiving and not return until the New Year rang in and the decorations came down. They would swim with the fishes and lie on the beach eating papaya. On the years they were tired of Fiji they would go to Bali or Sydney or any sunny, sandy place whose name contained an equal number of consonants and vowels.

Her mother and Russell now lived in the same neighborhood of her mind, which felt like a remote Norwegian fjord, or Fiji, a place that it would take so long to travel to that she would never go in person, and so hard to imagine the time difference that it was never convenient to telephone. They were both there, still, inside her brain, and sometimes she would wake up in the middle of the night and think, Now, now, if I could just pick up the phone right now, maybe I could catch them.

But in truth, everything you will ever experience in life is within your own body and your own mind. Breaking out of the matrix or travelling to Fiji won’t make any difference. It’s not that somewhere in your mind there is an iron chest with a big red warning sign ‘Open only in Fiji!’ and when you finally travel to the South Pacific you get to open the chest, and out come all kinds of special emotions and feelings that you can have only in Fiji. And if you never visit Fiji in your life, then you missed these special feelings for ever. No. Whatever you can feel in Fiji, you can feel anywhere in the world; even inside the matrix.

And how does a place get spoiled? Well, it is spoiled by people very like us, which reminds us of a further paradox of travel. On the one hand travel is self-enhancing, on the other hand it is rather sneakily demoralizing. We use travel (in vane) to enhance our image: "Yes, sure, I've been to Fiji, but not for years. I hear it's gotten kind of touristy." But though we wear our travels, when they are over, like badges, while we are actually traveling we suffer constant little erosions of self-regard everywhere we go. Because, fond as we may be of the notion of ourselves as "travelers," shrewd as we may be in our choice of destination and lodging and wines, we are aware of ourselves as part of that declassed, identity-blurred worldwide mob.

How can you say such things?!' demanded Kon Fiji. 'Our lives may have changed, but death has not. Respect for the elderly and honor given for a life well lived connect us to the accumulated wisdom of the past. When you die, do you wish to be buried as a common peasant instead of as a great scholar worthy of admiration?' 'In a hundred years, Master Kon Fiji, you and I will both be dust, and even the worms and birds who feast on our flesh will also have traveled through multiple revolutions of the wheel of life. Our lives are finite, but the universe is infinite. We are but flashes of lightning bugs on a summer night against the eternal stars. When I die, I wish to be laid out in the open so that the Big Island will act as my coffin, and the River of Heavenly Pearls my shroud; the cicadas will play my funeral possession, and the blooming flowers will be my incense burners; my flesh will feed ten thousand lives, and my bones will enrich the soil. I will return to the great Flow of the universe. Such honor can never be matched by mortal rites enacted by those obeying dead words copied out of a book.

Coe has always claimed he’s not a nationalist, and it’s true—unlike immigrant Abram, who cared most for America, Coe, Oregon-born, cares most for the American Christ, His power spread throughout the world even as the homeland is denied Him in the secular folly of church/state separation. One day, Coe believes—not yet—America (and Old Europe, too, the Germans and French and Italians who drifted from Christ once their prosperity was assured) will wake up and find itself surrounded by a hundred tiny God-led governments: Fiji, a “model for the nations” under a theocratic regime after 2001, a Family organizer boasted to me; and Uganda, made over as an experiment in faith-based initiatives by the Family’s favorite African brother, the dictator Yoweri Museveni; and Mongolia, where Coe traveled in the late 1980s to plant the seeds for that country’s post-communist laissez-faire regime.