Pacific Quotes

“Just as the sea is an open and ever flowing reality, so should our oceanic identity transcend all forms of insularity, to become one that is openly searching, inventive, and welcoming.”
― Epeli Hau'ofa, We Are the Ocean: Selected Works

“Take me to unexplored paradise & one of your best islands, I want to cross the pacific ocean and make a great memory. Let's go to the eastern coast of the Philippines where the waves meet the sky. You know where it is!”
― El Fuego

“Fraj-ile," I say, pronouncing it the way she does - as if it might be a popular tourist destination in the Pacific, beautiful Fraj Isle, with its white sandy beaches and shark-filled coves.”
― Dan Chaon, Stay Awake

“Earlier in the morning Company A, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines had attacked eastward into the ruins of Shuri Castle and had raised the Confederate flag. When we learned that the flag of the Confederacy had been hoisted over the very heart and soul of Japanese resistance, all of us Southerners cheered loudly. The Yankees among us grumbled, and the Westerners didn’t know what to do. Later we learned that the Stars and Stripes that had flown over Guadalcanal were raised over Shuri Castle, a fitting tribute to the men of the 1st Marine Division who had the honor of being first into the Japanese citadel.”
― Eugene B. Sledge, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa

“I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope.”
― Stephen King, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption

“For years, the Pacific had been trying to get basic assistance in the synthetics field from the Reich. However, the big German chemical cartels, I. G. Farben in particular, had harbored their patents; had, in fact, created a world monopoly in plastics, especially in the developments of the polyesters. By this means, Reich trade had kept an edge over Pacific trade, and in technology the Reich was at least ten years ahead. The interplanetary rockets leaving Festung Europa consisted mainly of heat-resistant plastics, very light in weight, so hard they survived even major meteor impact. The Pacific had nothing of this sort; natural fibers such as wood were still used, and of course the ubiquitous pot metals.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

“Russia is usually readier to ascribe misfortune to conspiracies rather than to the more probable screwup.”
― Dominic Ziegler, Black Dragon River: A Journey Down the Amur River at the Borderlands of Empires

“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 refuse to sit and wait for salvation. Every day I have looked to the sky for the white streak of a plane making its way across the Pacific, but I have not seen any.”
― Jennifer Arnett, Day One: A Novella

“There is nothing at any of our beaches at all comparable with the tremendous surf we saw at San Jose. Huge waves, mountains high, white and foaming, broke on the beach with a deafening roar and such awful power and fury as to make one shrink from the thought of launching upon its waters”
― Helen Josephine Sanborn, A Winter in Central America and Mexico.

“Legends speak of a primeval Pacific homeland called" Hiva "from which the first inhabitants of Easter Island came--a homeland that also fell victim to the" mischief of Uoke's lever "and was" submerged under the sea. "What is particularly intriguing about all this, because of its resonance with the Seven Sages--the Apkallu--spoken of in Mesopotamian antediluvian traditions, and with the Seven Sages of the Edfu Building Texts, who sought out new lands in which to recreate the drowned and devastated world of the gods, is that the Seven Sages--" king's sons, all initiated men "--are also said to have been instrumental in the original settlement of Easter Island. Exactly as was the case with the Apkallu, who laid the foundations of all the future temples of Mesopotamia, and with the Edfu Sages who traveled the length and breath of Egypt establishing the sacred mounds on which all future pyramids and temples were to be built, the first task of the Seven Sages from Hiva after their arrival on Easter Island was 'the construction of stone mounds.”
― Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization

“There is a reason the remote Pacific was the last place on Earth to be settled by humans: it was the most difficult, more daunting even than the deserts or the ice.”
― Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

“The Pacific will soon speak Chinese as the full moon comes to the light of day.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“I can feel it. The music. It feels as real to me as the Pacific wind caressing my face. As real as the rhythm of Landon's heart beating next to mine.
And I think he can feel it, too.”
― Jacqueline E. Smith, Shipwreck Girl

“Climate change is well underway in Hawaii!”
― Steven Magee

“The leaders on both sides of the Pacific have an obligation to establish a tradition of consultation and mutual respect so that, for their successors, jointly building a shared world order becomes an expression of parallel national aspirations.”
― Henry Kissinger, On China

“Ah, the Pacific, the silent witness to Lima's relentless evolution since its founding, what are your secrets, will you ever tell us?”
― Ryan Gelpke, Peruvian Nights

“I sought out men who’d had unusual experiences or more likely had usual ones that they understood with unusual clarity, and from this melange of information and observation I acquired a good perception of what the great Pacific adventure meant in human terms. Clearly, almost clinically, I concluded that if you ordered all the young men of a generation to climb Mount Everest, you would expect the climb to have a major significance in their lives. And while they were climbing the damned mountain they would bitch like hell and condemn the assignment, but years later, as they looked back, they’d see it as the supreme adventure it was and they’d want to read about it to reexperience it.
These thoughts led to a clear-cut conviction: Years from now the men who complain most loudly out here will want to explain to others what it was like. I’m sure of it, so I’m going to write down as simply and honestly as I can what it was really like. And I reassured myself: No one knows the Pacific better than I do; no one can tell the story more accurately. This was not a boast; it was true and relevant to the task I planned to set myself.”
—Chapter VIII, “Writing”, page 265”
― James A. Michener, The World Is My Home a Memoir