Top 1200 Ellis Island Quotes & Sayings

Burn the boats as you enter the island and you will take the island.

Ellis Island lies in New York Harbor 1,300 feet from Jersey City, New Jersey, and one mile from the tip of Manhattan. At the time of the first European settlement, it was mostly mud, sand, and oyster shells, which nearly disappeared at high tide.

Your grandparents did not endure the indignities of a steerage journey to Ellis Island so that you could stand outside a discothèque and beg a wallpaper designer to take you in with him.

I live on a lonely culinary island, built on (very thin) bedrock consisting of things I know, or believe, my family will eat. It is a small island. Fortunately, nachos are on that island with me, and nothing gets my family fired up like nachos for lunch.

Most American Jews came from the lower middle classes, and therefore they brought with them not a lot of Jewish culture. The American Jewish story starts with Ellis Island, and the candy store in the Bronx.

My grandparents, they came through Ellis Island in 1923, and you know, I'd heard all the stories.

California is an island, and New York's an island. Maybe it's time for me to change islands.

I know very little about my great grandparents, who came through Ellis Island in the early twentieth century, settled in Baltimore, and spoke only Yiddish.

What is the good of being an island, if you are not a volcanic island?

Every island to a child is a treasure island.

Most humans were on one big island, to the fairies, and that island was adrift on a sea called I Totally Don’t Care.

The diversity in the CNN makeup room - it's like Ellis Island! No, it's like Noah's Ark: there are two of everything.

Harbour Island in the Bahamas is a wonderful little island with beautiful beaches, a great restaurant culture and friendly, welcoming atmosphere.

I love the island of Majorca. I love the beach at Cala Ratjada, which is on the far side of the island where not many Britons go.

Staten Island is like a different world. If you're from Staten Island, you're like not from New York, you're from Staten Island.

The Islamic community today is faced with a new version of an old struggle. My late mother used to say it doesn't matter whether you came to this country on the Mayflower or on a slave ship, through Ellis Island or the Rio Grande. We're all in the same boat now.

I was born in a small clapboard house on an island, but I also have certain privileges that I didn't have when I was on the island. So that dichotomy again is actually really crucial.

"You are so close." "To whom? Margravine, not even to himself. This place, this island: all his life he's done nothing but hop from island to island. Is that a reason? Does there have to be a reason? Shall he tell you: he works for no Whitehall, non conceivable unless, ha, ha, the network of white halls in his own brain: these featureless corridors he keeps swept and correct for occasional visiting agents."

It wasn't Ginger's Island, it was Gilligan's Island.

I am the byproduct of an Ellis Island orgy, basically. I'm everything. I've got quite a mixture in me. I know a lot of it and I don't know some of it. I'm pretty mixed up, but mostly Russian and Irish.

This is our island. It's a good island. Until the grownups come to fetch us we'll have fun.

I grew up in Rhode Island. Most of my family on both sides is from Rhode Island.

My grandparents used to tell me stories about their trip to Ellis Island from Russia and life on the Lower East Side of New York.

At Ellis Island, I mean, you didn't go there if you arrived in first class. It was only the poorest, the people in the worst shape.

He looked like someone with a steerage ticket on the titanic. Somebody who'd be standing in line at Ellis Island. Undiluted and old-blooded. Also cute.

No, my family is Russian, Georgian, via Ellis Island.

The city of Cork - the urban center, where all the shops and bars and everything are - is actually an island, a river island.

Beginning with a trip out to Ellis Island, I saw for myself where thousands of European immigrants took their first steps onto American soil, bringing with them nothing but their ambition: people such as Erich von Stroheim and Adolph Zukor.

I was literally fabricated over in France and born about six months after the boat landed at Ellis Island. This was the heart of the Depression. For the first 12 years of my life we lived in a terrible ghetto on the East River.

I'm from Long Island. Strong Island.

Well, I do want to talk about the challenges at the border. New Mexico, if you will, has become an Ellis Island and we want to take that issue seriously and we're not going to shy away that it presents significant challenges.

When the ship is sinking and you're forced to choose sides, the new solution is to jump from island to island to island. You don't have to pick.

Thus sharply did the terrified three learn the difference between an island of make-believe and the same island come true.

For educated Americans like Joseph Ellis, Vietnam is a special hang-up. I am an Englishman of exactly the Vietnam generation, a couple of years younger than Ellis; indeed, for reasons too complicated to explain here, I was nearly drafted into the US army in 1965. I know many Americans of my own age and, as much to the point, my own class - journalists, publishers, lawyers. And I don't think I know one who served in Vietnam.

You, the Spirit of the Settlement! ... Not understand that America is God's crucible, the great melting-pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! Here, you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand in your fifty groups, with your fifty languages and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries.

People who are visiting Long Island find it's very beautiful, and they are quick to try Long Island foods, wines and other products.

Every great group is an island... but an island with a bridge to the mainland.

You were a stone wall, a fort in high, unreachable trees, an island, my own island, that no boat could reach.

I love Topsail Island, which my grandparents helped settle in 1950, despite the racial tensions. I wanted to immortalize my deep connection to this special island forever.

Voyaging great distances -- through forests, from island to island, across plains and into the mountains -- is all about finding ourselves.

I went to an island in the Bahamas full of iguanas. You don't live on the island, obviously, because it's solely populated by iguanas, and it's not allowed.

I'm from the island of St. Lucia in the Caribbean in the Lesser Antilles, the lower part of the archipelago, which is a bilingual island - French, Creole, and English - but my education is in English.

It's strange, because Long Island is still New York, but the farther you go out on Long Island, the more creepy it gets.

El Paso in many ways is the Ellis Island for Mexico and much of Latin America.

The thing I love about Vegas is that it's a melting pot. It's like working Ellis Island.

Nonfiction writers are second-class citizens, the Ellis Island of literature. We just can't quite get in. And yes, it pisses me off.

In his latest book Marc Ellis asks the defining question for Jewish life today: 'Can injustice, represented by Jewish domination of Jerusalem, be at the heart of the covenant?' Ellis's answer is that the covenant of Israel with God has been shattered by the creation of a state at the expense of Palestinian life in the land. It can only be renewed by a new ethic and practice of justice that reconcile these two people, who have become irrevocably linked together in the land, either for good or for ill.

As the son of a Cuban refugee and cousin and nephew to many Cubans on the island, I cringe when Americans visit Cuba for a fun island vacation.

All our science and philosophy form only an island of knowledge surrounded by an ocean of mystery. The larger the island grows, the longer the shoreline where the known meets the unknown.

I don't know the numbers, but roughly half of the people who came through Ellis Island returned home. They came here to make money, not to make history.

Sometimes I forget some of the things I've done. I recently recalled that after Watergate I went away by myself to Tahiti for a month, moving from island to island. That was a point in my life where I didn't know what was next.

'Strong Island' is slang for Long Island, New York. And it really grew out of - what may surprise people, it really grew out of the very vibrant hip-hop scene that, you know, is located and still generates artists out of Long Island.

When they got here, when they successfully emigrated - and not everybody that came through Ellis Island was accepted. If you were sick you were not allowed in. If you had any kind of a disease, we were in the process of trying to wipe out all these diseases. We did that by keeping people who had them out of the country. You might look at it today as, "Wow, that was really mean." No. It was putting America first. It was putting the American people first, and it was a realization that we can't take everybody.

Whether our ancestors came here on the Mayflower, on slave ships, whether they came to Ellis Island or LAX in Los Angeles, whether they came yesterday or walked this land a thousand years ago our great challenge for the 21st century is to find a way to be One America. We can meet all the other challenges if we can go forward as One America.

Australia is properly speaking an island, but it is so much larger than every other island on the face of the globe, that it is classed as a continent in order to convey to the mind a just idea of its magnitude.

I always remember to go on the Staten Island Ferry because it's the most amazing view of New York. And it's free! You see Ellis Island, and it conjures up something of that great moment: you know, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. It's staggering.

I'm here not just as an actress but as a woman, an African-American, a granddaughter of Ellis Island immigrants, a person who could not have afforded college without the help of student loans and as one of millions of volunteers working to re-elect President Obama!

Even though I'm not Jamaican, I've always loved Jamaican culture because, to me, it's the island of magic, it's the island of politics, of resistance.

We must not forget that these men and women who file through the narrow gates at Ellis Island, hopeful, confused, with bundles of misconceptions as heavy as the great sacks upon their backs these simple, rough-handed people are the ancestors of our descendants, the fathers and mothers of our children.

On 'Redneck Island,' a show I love, there was a lot of drama and storylines going on because someone's always voted off the island through process of elimination.