The Tenth Island Quotes

“There is a Portuguese word, saudade, that they say has no translation. It’s bigger than homesickness or missing someone. It’s a yearning that can be expressed in no other language. It is, as one Azorean friend puts it, “a strictly Portuguese word.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“Home—it seemed like a fragile idea to me. Is it where we’re from or where we are?”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“America has long been divided between those who believe its strength lies in diversity and those who are afraid of outsiders and blame social ills on whoever is in the latest wave of migrants.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“We have this one life. But all the roads not taken, all those other lives we might have lived, are a part of it too. Yearning—that terrible, beautiful gaping yawn of want for a person, a place, a chance, a change, or something we can’t name—leaves craters, spaces for us to hold more of life. Saudade might be a strictly Portuguese word, but aching want is a universal condition.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“He pulled a battered red photo album from his truck’s glove compartment and showed me pictures of green Azorean fields divided by hedges of lilac-colored hydrangeas. He showed me waves crashing against black volcanic rock and his ancient stone house next to the sea, the home where he returned every summer. “Over there the air is so clean, so nice. The ocean is right there. The fish are fresh, you catch and eat them, and the potatoes are so good, you won’t believe it. “We make wine. Put on shorts and get in there and smash grapes, and when you drink right away is sweet like juice. Every year when we get back from there, we’re fat,” Morais said. He loved his island house in the Azores so much that at the end of each summer, when he left, he had to have someone else close the door for him. “I’m a guy that came from the old country. I never go to school five minutes in this country, and still I work and I do good. I love my money. God bless this country,” he said. “But when I leave to close my door over there, I cry like a baby. I try so hard not to, but I cry.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“marriage works best when people live in separate countries.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“For all our talk about living in the moment, what makes the present beautiful and complete is also imagining what we will do next.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“When you go on an adventure, just trust that you’ll meet who you need to meet and hear what you need to hear because the really important stuff, you just can’t plan.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“Here’s to nothing,” he said. “That’s when anything can happen.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“I think they called them human-interest stories back then, when there was a belief that most humans shared a common interest in one another.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“Just being here, at ease, alone in the dark, made me realize I had been mindlessly maneuvering just-the-way-things-are, accepting that violence was always a possibility, never realizing there are other places where it doesn’t feel that way. Of course, my dad had a saying for this: “They might have a different way of doing things across the river.” Or in this case, the middle of the ocean. I liked the idea of my own, personal Tenth Island, made only of things I wanted to keep. I’d start by carrying inside me a place where a desk clerk looked confused when a woman asked where it was safe for her to walk alone.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“Historians believe the Holy Spirit tradition began with Joachim, a monk born in Calabria circa 1135. He was the abbot of a monastery in Fiore, Italy. He came to believe that the Trinity—the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—represented different ages for humanity. The age of the Father was in the past, they were living in the age of the Son, and ahead was the age of the Holy Spirit, according to Joachim’s reading of Scripture.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“In California, every spring weekend, somewhere in a Portuguese community, they are dishing out free soup. It’s a deeply spiritual rite but not a Catholic one, something seldom realized.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“But a friend of mine whose husband died has a theory that there are four chambers in the human heart—so even if one belongs for eternity to someone missing, there is still room for love.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“One thing is we spend most of our time with couples who like each other,” Elmano said. “Being around people who don’t like being married to each other can be contagious.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“But São Jorge startled me. From the ferry it looked like a towering emerald fortress ringed by waterfalls. It was a steep, secretive island.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“part of an e. e. cummings poem—the closest thing to a hymn that I have memorized: i thank You God for most this amazing / day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees / and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything / which is natural which is infinite which is yes.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“Something my father always told me was that the trick to success is to know when you have enough and stop and appreciate it.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“The Tenth Island is what you carry inside you. It’s what’s left when everything else falls away. Those of us who live between worlds just know the Tenth Island better. No matter where I have lived—I have never left my island.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“The world is a small place, and the currents can carry anyone anywhere.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“Stories almost always begin with a person at their low point.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“That night, after a hearty meal of sopas ladled out of huge pots and linguiça and Portuguese breads and cheeses,”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“I have thought about a DNA test. But I don’t like the idea, because I think it shouldn’t matter. I’m a proponent of a one-race sorting system: human.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“THE IMPORTANCE OF DAWDLING THEORY This theory holds that there is nothing more valuable than time to waste. The most interesting things are the ones tucked in the empty spaces to be discovered when dawdling, loitering, lying in bed. It’s the only part of the universe you can truly call your own.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“THE PAPER-CUT THEORY This theory holds that the tiny cuts made by bad bosses, broken romances, and the like sting more than real grief. It’s the difference between a deep throbbing wound and a paper cut. Our fingers have more nerves near the surface because that’s how we explore the world. So it hurts like hell when paper slices us. At the same time, scientists believe that our bodies know it’s not really life-threatening, so all the natural protective mechanisms, such as endorphins and bleeding, don’t kick into gear. And since paper is microscopically ragged, it leaves a jagged cut. Unlike the clean slice of a razor, which can kill us.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“The humidity keeps the hills a rich green and means that a wildfire won’t burn, but it can be hard on pudding-headed sorts overly concerned with the texture of their hair. Like me. Redheads are vulnerable to such worries. We’re conditioned to believe that there’s only a few flyaway hairs’ difference between siren and Pippi Longstocking, Little Orphan Annie, or Witchiepoo.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“Mark Twain mentioned the Azores in The Innocents Abroad but only to say, “Out of our whole ship’s company there was not a solitary individual who knew anything whatever about them.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“Recent archaeology finds suggest there may have been even earlier, unknown inhabitants who disappeared before the Portuguese arrived, raising the question of how people got to the middle of the ocean before the known advent of sailing ships.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“I wish I could figure out the rules that the universe follows for catching you when you jump off a cliff. There seems to be some sort of caveat that the life rafts won’t line up until after you’re hurtling through the air spread out for a belly flop.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

“Our next stop was Terceira’s surest shot for a tourist attraction: Algar do Carvão, probably the only known place in the world where you can walk inside the cone of a volcano. There was an initial explosion some three thousand two hundred years ago, and then two thousand years ago another eruption at the same site spewed molten lava inside the mountain. When the lava drained, it left chambers whose rock walls were as varied in colors of bronzes and golds as the cloak of the lover in the Gustav Klimt painting The Kiss.”
― Diana Marcum, The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores