Pacific Islands Quotes

“Paradise” is a suffering word, grossly overused and ineptly devalued in everyday hype and blurb. Yet, tired as it is, it will have to do. Nothing else conveys that sense of place that can inspire a blissful contentment.”
― Andrew Rayner, Reach for Paradise

“History teaches us many things. Most importantly, the things that made us who and what we are.”
― Robert Bonville, Voyages of Malolo: "The Secret of the Rongo"

“I am a bomb but I mean you no harm. That I still am here to tell this, is a miracle: I was deployed on May 15, 1957, but I didn’t go off because a British nuclear engineer, a young father, developed qualms after seeing pictures of native children marveling at the mushrooms in the sky, and sabotaged me. I could see why during that short drop before I hit the atoll: the island looks like god’s knuckles in a bathtub, the ocean is beautifully translucent, corals glow underwater, a dead city of bones, allowing a glimpse into a white netherworld. I met the water and fell a few feet into a chromatic cemetery. The longer I lie here, listening to my still functioning electronic innards, the more afraid I grow of detonating after all this time. I don’t share your gods, but I pray I shall die a silent death.”
― Marcus Speh, A Metazen Christmas

“Vast tracts of ocean, whether Polynesia, Micronesia or Melanesia, contain island populations that remain outside the modern world. They know about it, they may have traveled to it, they appreciate artifacts and medical help from it, but they live their daily lives much as hundreds of generations of ancestors before them, without money, electricity, phones, TV or manufactured food.”
― Andrew Rayner, Reach for Paradise

“I used to think Ming was her favorite. But she’s grown too private, too remote. Rachel is lost. And I am too haolefied, what my mother taught me, so we could survive in that other world, the one that killed her”
― Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues

“The flagstone terrace overlooked a golf course. At the bottom of its green slopes lay a dazzling band of sea. Twenty or thirty miles out, a string of brown hunchbacked islands lay on the bright horizon like basking tortoises. The woman looked at the Pacific and its islands as if they belonged to her. I found out later that one of them did.”
― Ross Macdonald, The Archer Files, The Complete Short Stories of Lew Archer, Private Investigator Including Newly Discovered Case Notes

“We would like to inspire young Banabans to uphold their rich culture and traditions for many future generations.”
― Raobeia Ken Sigrah, Te Rii ni Banaba

“When I grow too old to dream,
I’ll have you to remember,
When I grow too old to dream,
Your love will stay in my heart.”
― Witi Ihimaera, I've Been Thinking About You, Sister