Quotes from Kenneth Cain

grab my medical textbook from the Land Cruiser and find beriberi next to scurvy and rickets. It says that in Ceylon beri, beri! meant 'I can't, I can't!' First you can't stand and then you can't even sit up and in the end you quietly succumb on your back. Progressive, inexorable weakness leading to death – it fits perfectly. We have an outbreak of beriberi.

went to school with African-American girls during my entire adolescence in Michigan and never noticed them as potential girlfriends, never even wanted to meet them. How did that happen? I'm nine thousand miles from home and a pernicious wall of segregation I never noticed in high school suddenly materializes before my eyes, ten years after the fact. A young man should travel.

lot of the UN staff call themselves human rights experts but need a shoulder to cry on each time there's a killing. They belong in an office in Switzerland. Many of my French friends feign weary resignation whenever violence erupts, but that attitude was picked up on the cheap in some smoke-filled café. They haven't ever struggled and failed, haven't earned their cynicism. Ken's problem isn't cynicism, it's optimism out of control.

He looked at me like I'm the delivery boy who wants to marry his sister. He then proceeded to make it very clear he knows what he's doing and I don't. It was relentless.

Only a handful of inmates have ever gone to trial. Many were arrested years ago on minor charges such as stealing chickens or bicycles. The police refuse to take them before a judge, so they languish indefinitely, with no sentence to serve. If you're a rich murderer or rapist, you can easily just bribe your way out of trouble. But if you're a poor chicken thief and you get caught, you're lost.