Orphan Island Quotes

They were orphans of war, washed up on that little island in a tide of blood. What made them amazing wasn't that they had miraculous powers; that they had escaped the ghettos and gas chamges was miracle enough.

Wallace travelled independently and was challenged every step. He had no government or military support system. He had little cash — he earned enough to survive by sending natural history specimens to his agent in London for sale to collectors and museums. He had visceral moments of excitement when he discovered a beautiful new butterfly or adopted a baby orangutan he had just orphaned by shooting its mother. He lived simply, often in the rainforest on isolated islands, in a manner completely different to the expected behavior of other Western explorers and colonials.

Everything had its purpose. If you waited long enough, a useless thing would become useful again.

This isn’t fair,” Klaus said finally, but he said it so quietly that the departing islanders probably did not hear. Only his sisters heard him, and the snake the Baudelaires thought they would never see again, and of course Count Olaf, who was huddled in the large, ornate bird cage like an imprisoned beast, and who was the only person to answer him. “Life isn’t fair,” he said, in his undisguised voice, and for once the Baudelaire orphans agreed with every word the man said.

what a thing to do—to give up your whole self for someone else. To love someone that much. To be always and forever there, no matter what. To hold on like that.

from George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra: “Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

Dear reader who finds this, if I am gone, My name is Jinny I lived here on this island. I loved it. I stayed. I held on. Then, after a pause, Jinny added a line. She'd never be able to write it in ink, bit it was there all the same, a ghost in the letter. As she slid the piece of paper into her pocket, she whispered it aloud. I held on Too long.

We are curious creatures, we Taiwanese. Orphans. Eventually, orphans must choose their own names and write their own stories. The beauty of orphanhood is the blank slate.

The peculiarity for which they’d been hunted was simply their Jewishness. They were orphans of war, washed up on that little island in a tide of blood.

They were orphans of war, washed up on that little island in a tide of blood.

If you have read this far in the chronicle of the Baudelaire orphans - and I certainly hope you have not - then you know we have reached the thirteenth chapter of the thirteenth volume in this sad history, and so you know the end is near, even though this chapter is so lengthy that you might never reach the end of it. But perhaps you do not yet know what the end really means. "The end" is a phrase which refers to the completion of a story, or the final moment of some accomplishment, such as a secret errand, or a great deal of research, and indeed this thirteenth volume marks the completion of my investigation into the Baudelaire case, which required much research, a great many secret errands, and the accomplishments of a number of my comrades, from a trolley driver to a botanical hybridization expert, with many, many typewriter repairpeople in between. But it cannot be said that The End contains the end of the Baudelaires' story, any more than The Bad Beginning contained its beginning. The children's story began long before that terrible day on Briny Beach, but there would have to be another volume to chronicle when the Baudelaires were born, and when their parents married, and who was playing the violin in the candlelit restaurant when the Baudelaire parents first laid eyes on one another, and what was hidden inside that violin, and the childhood of the man who orphaned the girl who put it there, and even then it could not be said that the Baudelaires' story had not begun, because you would still need to know about a certain tea party held in a penthouse suite, and the baker who made the scones served at the tea party, and the baker's assistant who smuggled the secret ingredient into the scone batter through a very narrow drainpipe, and how a crafty volunteer created the illusion of a fire in the kitchen simply by wearing a certain dress and jumping around, and even then the beginning of the story would be as far away as the shipwreck that leftthe Baudelaire parents as castaways on the coastal shelf is far away from the outrigger on which the islanders would depart. One could say, in fact, that no story really has a beginning, and that no story really has an end, as all of the world's stories are as jumbled as the items in the arboretum, with their details and secrets all heaped together so that the whole story, from beginning to end, depends on how you look at it. We might even say that the world is always in medias res - a Latin phrase which means "in the midst of things" or "in the middle of a narrative" - and that it is impossible to solve any mystery, or find the root of any trouble, and so The End is really the middle of the story, as many people in this history will live long past the close of Chapter Thirteen, or even the beginning of the story, as a new child arrives in the world at the chapter's close. But one cannot sit in the midst of things forever. Eventually one must face that the end is near, and the end of The End is quite near indeed, so if I were you I would not read the end of The End, as it contains the end of a notorious villain but also the end of a brave and noble sibling, and the end of the colonists' stay on the island, as they sail off the end of the coastal shelf. The end of The End contains all these ends, and that does not depend on how you look at it, so it might be best for you to stop looking at The End before the end of The End arrives, and to stop reading The End before you read the end, as the stories that end in The End that began in The Bad Beginning are beginning to end now.

Cressbrook Mill was operated mostly by orphans who were treated worse than abysmally.

Actually, I did it because when we lived on Indian Island we had this turtle named Shelly.

fucking motorcycles off the plane?” In darkness, they set down on the uninhabited island of

Oh, dear," Sophia said, looking through the binos. "What happens in the compartment, stays in the compartment. What happens in the...Oh, screw that!" "It's not his fault!" Lee Ann McGregor was just turned twelve and an orphan. Also extremely pregnant. She was shivering under a blanket in the relative cool of the saloon, drinking tomato soup as if it was nectar and arguing to spare the life of the young man sitting next to her. The hangdog young man in question, Kevin White, was seventeen. And currently surrounded by women who were looking at him like a zombie that was in their targeting reticle. Wisely, he was keeping his mouth shut.

Humans out there are grotesque: Scrooges and Jellybys and filthy orphans in the caverns of blacking factories, in lonely depopulated homes, a blight called television like tiny Plato's caves in every room. It is grimmer in the Outside. There is a war in the Falkland Islands, there are Sandinistas and Contras, there are muggings and rapes, terrible things he has heard the adults talking about, has read about himself when he can find an old wrinkled paper in the Free Store. The president is an actor, placed in power to smoothly deliver the corporations' lies. There are bombs among the stars and murders in the inner cities, red rain over London, there are kidnappers and slaves even now, even in America.

I told him he must carry it thus. It was evident the sagacious little creature, having lost its mother, had adopted him for a father. I succeeded, at last, in quietly releasing him, and took the little orphan, which was no bigger than a cat, in my arms, pitying its helplessness. The mother appeared as tall as Fritz. I was reluctant to add another mouth to the number we had to feed; but Fritz earnestly begged to keep it, offering to divide his share of cocoa-nut milk with it till we had our cows. I consented, on condition that he took care of it, and taught it to be obedient to him. Turk, in the mean time, was feasting on the remains of the unfortunate mother. Fritz would have driven him off, but I saw we had not food sufficient to satisfy this voracious animal, and we might ourselves be in danger from his appetite. We left him, therefore, with his prey, the little orphan sitting on the shoulder of his protector, while I carried the canes. Turk soon overtook us, and was received very coldly; we reproached him with his cruelty, but he was quite unconcerned, and continued to walk after Fritz. The little monkey seemed uneasy at the sight of him, and crept into Fritz's bosom, much to his inconvenience. But a thought struck him; he tied the monkey with a cord to Turk's back, leading the dog by another cord, as he was very rebellious at first; but our threats and caresses at last induced him to submit to his burden. We proceeded slowly, and I could not help anticipating the mirth of my little ones, when they saw us approach like a pair of show-men. I advised Fritz not to correct the dogs for attacking and killing unknown animals. Heaven bestows the dog on man, as well as the horse, for a friend and protector. Fritz thought we were very fortunate, then, in having two such faithful dogs; he only regretted that our horses had died on the passage, and only left us the ass. "Let us not disdain the ass," said I; "I wish we had him here; he is of a very fine breed, and would be as useful as a horse to us." In such conversations, we arrived at the banks of our river before we were aware. Flora barked to announce our approach, and Turk answered so loudly, that the terrified little monkey leaped from his back to the shoulder of its protector, and would not come down. Turk ran off to meet his companion, and our dear family soon appeared on the opposite shore, shouting with joy at our happy return. We crossed at the same place as we had done in the morning, and embraced each other. Then began such a noise of exclamations. "A monkey! a real, live monkey! Ah! how delightful! How glad we are! How did you catch him?

Every place held every memory of what it had once been. A plain that had been the bottom of a lake, the floor of a shallow sea, the lightless depths of a vast ocean. A hill that had been the peak of a young mountain, one of a chain of islands, the jagged fang of the earth buried in glacial ice. Dust that had been plants, sand that had been stone, stains that had been bone and flesh. Most memories, Kalyth understood, remain hidden, unseen and beneath the regard of flickering life. Yet, once the eyes were awakened, every memory was then unveiled, a fragment here, a hint there, a host of truths whispering of eternity. Such knowledge could crush a soul with its immensity, or drown it beneath a deluge of unbearable futility. As soon as the distinction was made, that separation of self from all the rest, from the entire world beyond-its ceaseless measure of time, its whimsical game with change played out in slow siege and in sudden catastrophe-then the self became an orphan, bereft all security, and face to face with a world now become at best a stranger, at worst an implacable, heartless foe. In arrogance we orphan ourselves, and then rail at the awful solitude we find on the road to death But how could one step back into the world? How could one learn to swim such currents? In self-proclamation, the soul decided what it was that lay within in opposition to all that lay beyond. Inside, outside, familiar, strange, that which is possessed, that which is coveted, all that is within grasp and all that is forever beyond reach. The distinction was a deep, vicious cut of a knife, severing tendons and muscles, arteries and nerves.

Watching, the ancient bull whale was swept up in memories of his own birthing. His mother had been savaged by sharks three months later; crying over her in the shallows of Hawaiki, he had been succoured by the golden human who became his master. The human had heard the young whale’s distress and had come into the sea, playing a flute. The sound was plangent and sad as he tried to communicate his oneness with the young whale’s mourning. Quite without the musician knowing it, the melodic patterns of the flute’s phrases imitated the whalesong of comfort. The young whale drew nearer to the human, who cradled him and pressed noses with the orphan in greeting. When the herd travelled onward, the young whale remained and grew under the tutelage of his master. The bull whale had become handsome and virile, and he had loved his master. In the early days his master would play the flute and the whale would come to the call. Even in his lumbering years of age the whale would remember his adolescence and his master; at such moments he would send long, undulating songs of mourning through the lambent water. The elderly females would swim to him hastily, for they loved him, and gently in the dappled warmth they would minister to him. In a welter of sonics, the ancient bull whale would communicate his nostalgia. And then, in the echoing water, he would hear his master’s flute. Straight away the whale would cease his feeding and try to leap out of the sea, as he used to when he was younger and able to speed toward his master. As the years had burgeoned the happiness of those days was like a siren call to the ancient bull whale. But his elderly females were fearful; for them, that rhapsody of adolescence, that song of the flute, seemed only to signify that their leader was turning his thoughts to the dangerous islands to the south-west.

Like,” he repeats with distaste. “How about I tell you what I don’t like? I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires. I rarely stock debuts, chick lit, poetry, or translations. I would prefer not to stock series, but the demands of my pocketbook require me to. For your part, you needn’t tell me about the ‘next big series’ until it is ensconced on the New York Times Best Sellers list. Above all, Ms. Loman, I find slim literary memoirs about little old men whose little old wives have died from cancer to be absolutely intolerable. No matter how well written the sales rep claims they are. No matter how many copies you promise I’ll sell on Mother’s Day.” Amelia blushes, though she is angry more than embarrassed. She agrees with some of what A.J. has said, but his manner is unnecessarily insulting. Knightley Press doesn’t even sell half of that stuff anyway. She studies him. He is older than Amelia but not by much, not by more than ten years. He is too young to like so little. “What do you like?” she asks. “Everything else,” he says. “I will also admit to an occasional weakness for short-story collections. Customers never want to buy them though.” There is only one short-story collection on Amelia’s list, a debut. Amelia hasn’t read the whole thing, and time dictates that she probably won’t, but she liked the first story. An American sixth-grade class and an Indian sixth-grade class participate in an international pen pal program. The narrator is an Indian kid in the American class who keeps feeding comical misinformation about Indian culture to the Americans. She clears her throat, which is still terribly dry. “The Year Bombay Became Mumbai. I think it will have special int—” “No,” he says. “I haven’t even told you what it’s about yet.” “Just no.” “But why?” “If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll admit that you’re only telling me about it because I’m partially Indian and you think this will be my special interest. Am I right?” Amelia imagines smashing the ancient computer over his head. “I’m telling you about this because you said you liked short stories! And it’s the only one on my list. And for the record”—here, she lies—“it’s completely wonderful from start to finish. Even if it is a debut. “And do you know what else? I love debuts. I love discovering something new. It’s part of the whole reason I do this job.” Amelia rises. Her head is pounding. Maybe she does drink too much? Her head is pounding and her heart is, too. “Do you want my opinion?” “Not particularly,” he says. “What are you, twenty-five?” “Mr. Fikry, this is a lovely store, but if you continue in this this this”—as a child, she stuttered and it occasionally returns when she is upset; she clears her throat—“this backward way of thinking, there won’t be an Island Books before too long.

Count Olaf scowled, and put one muddy finger on the trigger of the harpoon gun. “If that’s Kit Snicket or some bratty orphan,” he said, “I’ll harpoon her right where she stands. No ridiculous volunteer is going to take my island away from me!” “You don’t want to waste your last harpoon,” Violet said, thinking quickly. “Who knows where you’ll find another one?” “That’s true,” Olaf admitted. “You’re becoming an excellent henchwoman.” “Poppycock,” growled Sunny, baring her teeth at the count.

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.

I’m an Indian.” She’s never told anyone this except Jack. To Tyler she knows she’s just . . . Goth, if he thinks of her at all. “Penobscot. I was born on Indian Island. And I just want to say that what happened to the Indians is exactly like what happened to the Irish under British rule. It wasn’t a fair fight. Their land was stolen, their religion was forbidden, they were forced to bend to foreign domination. It wasn’t okay for the Irish, and it’s not okay for the Indians.” “Jeez,

My hands are clammy. It’s a terrible kind of anticipation, not knowing what we’re walking into. The last time I felt this way I was in the waiting rooms at Ellis Island.

My hands are clammy. It’s a terrible kind of anticipation, not knowing what we’re walking into. The last time I felt this way I was in the waiting rooms at Ellis Island. We were tired, and Mam wasn’t well, and we didn’t know where we were going or what kind of life we would have. But now I can see all I took for granted: I had a family. I believed that whatever happened, we’d be together. A policeman blows a whistle

And he then said, “O! my soul, look back with gratitude on what the Lord hath done for thee in this excursion. I think it is the seventy-fifth day since I arrived at Rhode Island. My body was then weak, but the Lord has much renewed its strength. I have been enabled to preach, I think, one hundred and seventy-five times in public, besides exhorting frequently in private. I have traveled upwards of eight hundred miles, and gotten upwards of seven hundred pounds sterling, in goods, provisions, and money, for the Georgia orphans. Never did God vouchsafe to me greater comforts. Never did I see such a continuance of the Divine presence in the congregations to whom I have preached.” [Collection of his Journals, p. 437.]

On Jeju, we had a saying: If there is happiness at age three, it will last until you reach eighty. I belived this to be true. Mi-ja, on the other hand, often said, "I was born on a day with no sun and no moon. Did my parents know how hard my life would be?" We could not have been more different and yet we were very close.

walked with her

kept one foot

Your courage is there, right alongside of your fear.

I resent your insinuation that Fulton is a coward,” she said. “He’s a very fine man.” Suddenly, Steven stopped right in the middle of the trail. Emma, who had just built up a good head of steam, collided with him—hard. For a long moment, Steven held her to him without even using his arms. No, it was the look in his eyes that gripped her, that made her feel as if something warm was spilling over within her. “If he’s such a fine man,” he reasoned, his voice hardly more than a rasp, “how come you’re out here with me?” Emma was so flabbergasted by the question, and by the obvious answer, that she just stared up at Steven’s face. She felt like a field mouse looking into the eyes of a tomcat. “Well?” Steven prompted, his lips just a hair’s breadth from hers. Coming to her senses at the last second, Emma leaped backward, causing her handbag to thump painfully against her thigh. “I’m here with you because we have a bargain, Mr. Fairfax,” she blurted out. “You promised to leave Whitneyville forever, remember?” “If you still want me to,” Steven pointed out, and then he was forging his way through the wilds of that overgrown island again, dragging Emma after him. He

She remembers third grade at the Indian Island School, where she learned that the name Penobscot is from Panawahpskek, meaning “the place where the rocks spread out” at the head of the tribal river, right where they were. That Wabanaki means “people of the Dawnland,” because the tribes live in the region where the first light of dawn touches the American continent.

She knows that she was named for Molly Molasses, a famous Penobscot Indian born the year before America declared its independence from England. Molly Molasses lived into her nineties, coming and going from Indian Island, and was said to possess m’teoulin, power given by the Great Spirit to a few for the good of the whole. Those who possess this power, her dad said, could interpret dreams, repel disease or death, inform hunters where to find game, and send a spirit helper to harm their enemies.

George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra: “Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

The counting felt good to her. It was something, anyway, a thing she could do, a kind of knowledge.

broken calls to broken,

You can run from things while staying in the same place.

Sauder, author of the 1996 book Underground Bases and Tunnels: What is the Government Trying to Hide?, also spoke of the US Navy’s undersea test and research center off the coast of Andros Island, in the Bahamas. He speculated that the facility, which is known as AUTEC (Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Centre), could be a front for an undersea complex of secret bases.

She remembered once, years back, she and Deen had snuck away on a Changing night and made a bed in the high grass of the prairie, with their blankets and pillows. When they’d woken up, there had been a mouse, chewing on the pillow between them, and Deen had screamed so loud that Jinny’s ears rang.

Mark Twain commented on the Philippine war: We have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields; burned their villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors; furnished heartbreak by exile to some dozens of disagreeable patriots; subjugated the remaining ten millions by Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket; we have acquired property in the three hundred concubines and other slaves of our business partner, the Sultan of Sulu, and hoisted our protecting flag over that swag. And so, by these Providences of God—and the phrase is the government’s, not mine—we are a World Power.

Dear reader who finds this, if I am gone My name is Jinny I lived on this island I loved it I held on Too long

born on Indian Island. And I just want to say that what happened to the Indians is exactly like what happened to the Irish under British rule. It wasn’t a fair fight. Their land was stolen, their religion was forbidden, they were forced to bend to foreign domination. It wasn’t okay for the Irish, and it’s not okay for the Indians.” “Jeez, soapbox much?” Tyler mutters. Megan McDonald, one seat ahead of Molly, raises her hand, and Mr. Reed nods. “She has a point,” she says. “My grandpa’s from Dublin. He’s always talking about what the Brits did.” “Well, my granddad’s parents lost everything in the Great Depression. You don’t see me crying for handouts. Shit happens, excuse my French,” Tyler says. “Tyler’s French aside,” Mr. Reed says, raising his eyebrows at the class as if to say

They

After a moment, she decided to stick out her own little hand alongside the other two, as though this was the way people greeted each other on the island. Hand extended, she looked up at the boys for approval.