Vanuatu 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.

The Convention Centre had caused great consternation in Vanuatu for many years. All of this was the result that Vanuatu didn’t want it, Vanuatu didn’t ask for it, and Vanuatu couldn’t afford it. That hadn’t stopped the generosity of the Chinese Government insisting on building it with very favourable financial terms.

Wisdom is really the key to wealth. With great wisdom, comes great wealth and success. Rather than pursuing wealth, pursue wisdom. The aggressive pursuit of wealth can lead to disappointment. Wisdom is defined as the quality of having experience, and being able to discern or judge what is true, right, or lasting. Wisdom is basically the practical application of knowledge. Rich people have small TVs and big libraries, and poor people have small libraries and big TVs. Become completely focused on one subject and study the subject for a long period of time. Don't skip around from one subject to the next. The problem is generally not money. Jesus taught that the problem was attachment to possessions and dependence on money rather than dependence on God. Those who love people, acquire wealth so they can give generously. After all, money feeds, shelters, and clothes people. They key is to work extremely hard for a short period of time (1-5 years), create abundant wealth, and then make money work hard for you through wise investments that yield a passive income for life. Don't let the opinions of the average man sway you. Dream, and he thinks you're crazy. Succeed, and he thinks you're lucky. Acquire wealth, and he thinks you're greedy. Pay no attention. He simply doesn't understand. Failure is success if we learn from it. Continuing failure eventually leads to success. Those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly. Whenever you pursue a goal, it should be with complete focus. This means no interruptions. Only when one loves his career and is skilled at it can he truly succeed. Never rush into an investment without prior research and deliberation. With preferred shares, investors are guaranteed a dividend forever, while common stocks have variable dividends. Some regions with very low or no income taxes include the following: Nevada, Texas, Wyoming, Delaware, South Dakota, Cyprus, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Panama, San Marino, Seychelles, Isle of Man, Channel Islands, Curaçao, Bahamas, British Virgin Islands, Brunei, Monaco, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Bermuda, Kuwait, Oman, Andorra, Cayman Islands, Belize, Vanuatu, and Campione d'Italia. There is only one God who is infinite and supreme above all things. Do not replace that infinite one with finite idols. As frustrated as you may feel due to your life circumstances, do not vent it by cursing God or unnecessarily uttering his name. Greed leads to poverty. Greed inclines people to act impulsively in hopes of gaining more. The benefit of giving to the poor is so great that a beggar is actually doing the giver a favor by allowing the person to give. The more I give away, the more that comes back. Earn as much as you can. Save as much as you can. Invest as much as you can. Give as much as you can.

for what is life, a good life, but the accumulation of small pleasures?

i'm off to an island nation where formal wear consists of a leaf tired around a penis.

Nevertheless, while I may not have completely understood what Holy Communion was all about, Catholicism did allow me to see the nuances in cannibalism. Eating the flesh of another human being, I understood, might not always be a really, really bad thing to do. If you were a good Catholic, you had some every Sunday.

Ma appena un oggetto emanava noia, non avevo quasi bisogno di guardare la didascalia: era un pettine (o una maschera, o un’effigie) originaria del Vanuatu, che somigliava in modo straordinario ai pettini (o alle maschere, o alle effigi) che si vedono nel novantanove per cento dei musei di anticaglia municipale del mondo intero, dove ci tocca contemplare le eterne punte di silice o le collane di denti di cui i nostri lontani antenati hanno creduto necessario stipare le loro grotte. Esporre quel genere di cose mi è sempre sembrato assurdo, come se gli archeologi del futuro si mettessero in testa di esporre le nostre forchette di plastica e i nostri piatti di carta.

But what was really surprising was how early the dates were: at 2,800 years before the present, they pushed the occupation of New Caledonia back to the end of the first millennium B.C. IN THE YEARS that followed, Lapita sites would be discovered on the Mussau Islands off Papua New Guinea, the Reef and Santa Cruz Islands, Tikopia Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga, Futuna, and Samoa—in other words, virtually everywhere between the Bismarck Archipelago and the western edge of Polynesia. Dates from these sites confirmed the age of the culture represented by these ceramics, but they also revealed an unexpected pattern: Lapita settlements across a 2,500-mile swath of the western Pacific—from roughly the Solomon Islands to Samoa—seem to have appeared almost simultaneously around 1000 B.C. Furthermore, east of the Solomons, they appeared to represent a cultural horizon: no one predated them in these islands, archaeologically speaking; no cultural artifacts underlay theirs.

La ausencia de hambre es un drama que nadie ha estudiado. Al igual que esas enfermedades huérfanas por las que la investigación no se interesa, la no‐hambre no corre el riesgo de despertar curiosidad: aparte de la población de Vanuatu, no afecta a nadie más. Nuestra sobrealimentación occidental no tiene nada que ver con eso. Basta salir a la calle para ver a gente muriéndose de hambre. Y, para ganarnos el pan, tenemos que trabajar. En nosotros, el apetito es algo vivo.

On Washington’s Red Line, which may as well be called the White Line as it rumbles below the city’s palest quadrant, the atmosphere is discernibly different. It is all rustling of newspapers and ruffling of reports. It is sighing and harrumphing, little nonverbal gestures that say, all things being equal, they rather wish the entire world would fuck off. Washingtonians, it occurred to me, were not flip-flop people. I wondered how different America would be if the capital had been located in Key West. What if the nation’s motto had been Let’s get drunk and screw? Would the world be a better place?

Kava acts as an appetite suppressant. Ideally, for kava to do its wonders, one shouldn’t eat for three or four hours prior to imbibing. After a kava session, there is no desire for food, except, possibly, for a slice of papaya or a banana. Heavy kava users are invariably rail thin. Indeed, the Frenchwomen in Vila were known to use kava as a diet drug.

originator of all tings. “According to legend, in dat time der were many wild animals on Dalvalo—lions, tigers, elephants, and sharks as big as dis boat. Deez were very dangerous creatures, and human people are what dey had for breakfast, lunch, and suppa. Well, da first chief of Dalvalo, named Huakelle, come up wif a plan to distribute some of dis danger elsewhere in da universe. So he took fiery lava dat squirt off da volcano, and he trows it in all directions and creates Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and America. Some of da small drops of hot lava got caught and was scatted by da wind, and dis what made da rest of da islands of Vanuatu and all Melanesia. “Da chief den ordered giant canoes to be built. Not only was der too many dangerous animals on Dalvalo, der was too many people, so he sent a bunch of animals and people off in da giant canoe to da new land. Most a da canoes went to Africa, but some got caught up in storms and wrecked on da reef. People was tossed into da sea, and when dey finally got to land again, dey noticed dat da salt wattah had bleached dem white. Dat is how you got here.

The Chief took my hand. His felt like leaves – cool and dry. And then he spoke in Bislama, the English-based pidgin that helps the people of the Vanuatu archipelago, with their eighty islands and their 118 languages, understand one another. ‘Bilip,’ he said. ‘Me wantem come.’ Philip. I want him to come. It sounded aggrieved, as if Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, King of the World and son of the local mountain god, was pushing it a bit and the Chief had had enough. Then he tapped the ground and pointed at me. What brought you here? ‘Long story,’ I said. They understood, because the words mean the same in Bislama. And they laughed at that, and settled down around us on logs and stones, in that windy, dusty meeting ground, rubbing their hands. Down Tanna way, they love a long story. It was 1982 when Prince Philip rode in a train to Manchester, passing right by my bedroom window, and waved at me.

One index of this complexity was actually recognized by both Forster and d’Urville, though neither of them understood it at the time. This was the extraordinary proliferation of languages in Melanesia. It had been the similarity of languages across the islands of Polynesia that had first led to the idea of a single Polynesian “nation,” but no such unity exists in the islands to the west. Even today on New Caledonia—an island roughly the size of New Jersey—between thirty and forty languages are spoken. One hundred and ten languages have been recorded in the islands of Vanuatu. And in New Guinea, which is famous for being the most linguistically diverse place on earth, there are more than 950 languages belonging to a still unknown number of language families. To a linguist, what such extreme diversity indicates is depth of time. Languages are always changing—splitting and morphing and turning into new languages—and the more time they have in which to do this, the more languages there are. Consider the changes that have occurred in English just since Chaucer’s day, and then imagine what might happen if this process were to continue for, say, forty thousand years.

Vanuatu has over 100 languages in use among the 230,000 population. I don’t know how a place can run like this. Surely a lot of people have to speak a certain language for it to qualify as one.

Incredible maybe, but also, as it happens, true. Banks had stumbled upon one of the most remarkable facts about the peopling of the Pacific, which is that all the languages of Polynesia, Micronesia, Fiji, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, and the Philippines, as well as almost all the languages of Indonesia and the Solomon Islands and some of the languages of Malaysia, New Guinea, Madagascar, and Taiwan, belong to a single language family known as Austronesian. Today there are believed to be more than a thousand languages in the Austronesian family, with more than three hundred million speakers worldwide, making it one of the largest language families on the planet.