“When I turned 30, I was done with Thousand Island dressing. I have moved on to Island Number 1001.”

“Yet for the first time in three days, I want something. I want the forest lord to turn me into a cedar. The very oldest islanders say that if you are in the interior mountains on the night when the forest lord counts his trees, he includes you in the number and turns you into a tree.”

“I knew I couldn't live in America and I wasn't ready to move to Europe so I moved to an island off the coast of America - New York City .”

“I called this island Bad Humored Island, as we were in a bad humor.”

“The term 'Savage' is, I conceive, often misapplied, and indeed, when I consider the vices, cruelties, and enormities of every kind that spring up in the tainted atmosphere of a feverish civilization, I am inclined to think that so far as the relative wickedness of the parties is concerned, four or five Marquesan Islanders sent to the United States as Missionaries might be quite as useful as an equal number of Americans despatched to the Islands in a similar capacity.”

“No man is an island,” he says. “Islands are made of dirt and rocks and trees. I don’t know any people made of such things. Therefore, people are not islands.”