My favourite is "an island in the sky" - suits everything, the foggy weather, the isolation, the cultural self-sufficiency, the beauty.
I like this quote from a U.S. serviceman during WWII that I read recently:
A couple other favourites...
"St. John's, Newfoundland, the most entertaining town in North America, suggesting to me sometimes a primitive San Francisco, sometimes Bergen in Norway, occasionally China, and often Ireland of long ago." - Jan Morris, Welsh travel writer.
Lead paragraph in an Irish Times article - damn, they get us.
"The residents of Newfoundland don’t like being called ‘Newfies’ or Canadians, but you can call them Irish. Newfoundland is not Canada, as the people there
never tire of telling you. “Canada”, in this context, is not just a euphemism for “boring”, “law-abiding” or “flat”, the island only voted to join the confederation of provinces in 1948, and that vote was split 51 to 49 per cent – a cause of some abiding bitterness among the baymen, the former fishermen who live along these rocky shores."