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To think of an island as a singular speck or a momument to human
isolation is missing the point. Islands beget islands: a terrestrial island is surrounded by an
island of water, which is surrounded by an island of air, all of which makes up our island universe.
That's how the mind works too: one idea unspools into a million concentric thoughts. To sit on an
island, then, is not a way of disconnecting ourselves but, rather, a way we can understand
relatedness... Islands are places where exchanges occur. Because the boundaries are so sharp,
islands remind us of beginnings and endings, of birth and the arousal of consciousness or the
evolutionary movement from water to land and air. At places of exile and island prisons like Sado
or Alcatraz, waterline is a hard edge, forbidding as broken glass and high fences. We crave island
holidays, hoping that within the geographical confines of an island we can, paradoxically, expand,
shed old skin, reimagine ourselves...here, the rind of earth rubs itself down into water, and water
and air become the same thing, always exchanging chemical and physical balances, like trading
clothes.
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-Gretel Ehrlich
From "Island" and "Home Is How Many Places", essays in Islands, The Universe, Home, 1991
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The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on
an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is
to reclaim a little more land.
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-T.H. Huxley
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I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore,
and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than
ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
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-Isaac Newton
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The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. From
it we have learned most of what we know. Recently, we have waded a little out to sea, enough to
dampen our toes or, at most, wet our ankles. The water seems inviting. The ocean calls.
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-Carl Sagan
Cosmos, 1980
Chapter I, "The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean"
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The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline
of wonder.
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-Ralph W. Sockman
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We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island
of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
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-John A. Wheeler
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