Quotes from Alan Brennert

At least I know today that I will not have to wait that long.

In these small things she felt his absence, not his presence

I've come to believe that how we choose to live with pain, or injustice, or death...is the true measure of the Divine within us. Some, like Crossen, choose to do harm to themselves and others. Others, like Kenji, bear up under their pain and help other to bear it.

I am your new love to be kissed My flower, my lei, my love for you Is unforgettable . . .

By now the streets of Kalaupapa were filled with people racing for high ground - sick people crying Tsunami! as nature played yet another mean trick on them, God's last best joke at their expense. It was, after all, April Fool's Day.

There is beauty,' she said, 'in the least beautiful of things.

population of Hawai'i was more than a quarter of a million people; a hundred years later, it had plummeted to fewer than sixty thousand.

Ruth marveled at how two souls—two completely different species—could make each other so happy. If you were kind to animals, they repaid that kindness a thousandfold. People disappointed; animals never did.

He had the look, it seemed to me, of a man who had awakened one day to find himself clinging to the cattle catcher of an express train: under the circumstances, all one could do was to hang on.

Legend holds that seesaws became popular with girls because on the upswing they were able to catch a glimpse of the world beyond their cloistered walls.

Hawai'i became only the second sovereign nation to join the United States. But unlike the Republic of Texas, where a public referendum was held, no one asked the thirty-one thousand native Hawaiians whether they wished to give up their country. Twenty-nine thousand of them signed a petition of protest, which was submitted to Congress and politely ignored.

Before Cook's arrival the native population of Hawai'i was more than a quarter of a million people; a hundred years later, it

No cat is bad luck

This idea that sickness was the result of tiny, nearly invisible creatures swarming in the blood would have seemed ridiculous but for the fact that Dr. Mouritz had once shown her, under a microscope, the pink, tube-shaped "bacteria" discovered to be the cause of leprosy by the Norwegian scientist Gerhard Hansen.

There were, Mouritz believed, three forms of the disease: one which attacked primarily the skin, and which spread rapidly and horribly throughout the body; one which attacked the nerves, progressing more slowly and with less deformity; and certain borderline cases, a mix of the two. Haleola had the neural form;

She remembers the pain of losing him, but she smiles at the happiness he brought her, cherishing the joy she felt at his side.

There is beauty,' she said, 'in the least beautiful things.

She would have given anything, any number of days of her life, just to hear Sarah call her "Little Miss Shoe.

We make a home for ourselves, every time we work on something: actors, writers, singers, building these little nests in our gypsy souls, in place of the ones we so seldom seem to make in our own lives. And then suddenly it's over, and we have to start again.

A woman feels a man inside her and feels life. The act they engage in is the one from which all life springs, and for that moment they can feel that they are living, not dying.

She bought cleaning supplies and groceries at the Piggly Wiggly supermarket, itself a revelation to her: so many kinds of food, so many different brands!

It was disquieting to Eddie, this jarring contrast between the bright, cheery atmosphere inside Palisades and the slowly darkening world outside it. As calliope music played and diapered babies crawled in derbies, bombs fell on the other side of the world, which no longer seemed so comfortably distant.

But no - I was his wife, and it was my duty to share his pain as I shared his success. I walked out the front door and joined him on the sidewalk, slipping my hand into his like a thread into a needle; and together we looked up at this sign, once the embodiment of a dream, now merely a remembrance of it.

Beyond the light was that distant line of horizon she had glimpsed from on high—a line like a solitary prison bar, needing no intersection with other bars to keep her jailed. And she decided then and there that she would not stay here and be mocked; she would not.