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To hold us in check when our desires grow immoderate. As long as our desires are moderate we have no need of laws.

If Providence were to watch over all of us,” said Cruso, “who would be left to pick the cotton and cut the sugar cane? For the business of the world to prosper, Providence must sometimes wake and sometimes sleep, as lower creatures do.”

He is the child of his silence.

I tell myself I talked to Friday to educate him out of darkness and silence. But is that the truth? There are times when benevolence deserts me and I use words only as the shortest way to subject him to my will.

Cannibals are no less dull than Englishmen.

I am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story.

To live in silence is to live like the whales.

If we devote ourselves to finding holes exactly shaped to house such great words as Freedom, Honor, Bliss, I agree, we shall spend a lifetime slipping and sliding and searching, and all in vain.

We can bring [the island] to life only by setting it within a larger story.

But those whom we have abused we customarily grow to hate.

To tell the truth in all its substance you must have quiet and a comfortable chair away from all distraction, and a window to stare through and then the knack of seeing waves when there are fields before your eyes…

There is, in short no end to the story of life. There are merely pauses. The end is the arbitrary intervention of the teller, but there can be no finality about the choice. Today’s end is, after all tomorrow’s beginning.