Quotes from Alan Brennert

There might be more to the universe than any one religion could explain.

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. ... I used to wonder, why did God give children leprosy? Now I believe: God doesn't give anyone leprosy. He gives us, if we choose to use it, the spirit to live with leprosy, and with the imminence of death. Because it is in our own mortality that we are most Divine.

Rachel barely noticed any of it, and not just because she was insulated by the press of bodies on every side fo her. She paid little mind to the deck buckling beneath her like a maddened mule, or even to the stink of feces and urine that the exiles were forced to void where they sat. She was simply numb, her mind having absorbed all the fear it could, like a sponge saturated with water: after a while the fear became a constant, cold companion, a simple fact of existence.

Yet sometimes it seems the world is more moved by the death of one white priest than by the passing of hundreds, thousands, of Hawaiians. Everyone knows Damien's name now, but will anyone remember these girls, other than you and me?

And sometimes—as on the morning of April 1, 1946—she would dream again of being

Your religion is all about being miserable, and wretched. Ours had time for play, and joy. How is this an improvement?

No one can dispute that. He was a good man, a kind man. "But you know, so was my husband Keo. So were hundreds of other men who lived and died here. Yet sometimes it seems the world is more moved by the death of one white priest than by the passing of hundreds, thousands, of Hawaiians. Everyone knows Damien's name now, but will anyone remember these girls, other than you and me?

But it's a poor church that cares only for what happens to a soul after it leaves this life." -Damien

Learn how to smile in the cannibal pot and life will be so much easier.

Fear is good. In the right degree it prevents us from making fools of ourselves. But in the wrong measure it prevents us from fully living. Fear is our boon companion but never our master.