“Fear is our boon companion but never our master.”

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

It is not just the history of the Hawaiian islands but the significance of the ordinary people whose lives – many quite extraordinary – make up that history.

A road need not be paved in gold to find treasures at its end.

She realized now wrong she’d been; the pali wasn’t a headstone and Kalaupapa wasn’t a grave.

Perhaps you need to look back before you can move ahead.

Just as He gave us the capacity to laugh when we hurt, or to struggle on when we feel like giving up. 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.

God didn’t give man wings; He gave him the brains and the spirit to give himself wings.

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

Many different tastes share the plate, but none of them lose their individual flavor, and together they make up a uniquely ‘local’ cuisine.

Hawai’i is not truly the idyllic paradise of popular songs–islands of love and tranquility, where nothing bad ever happens.

It was and is a place where people work and struggle, live and die, as they do the world over.

When we are young, we think life will be like a supo: one fabric, one weave, one grand design.

It was a community like any other, bound by ties deeper than most, and people here went to their deaths as people did anywhere: with great reluctance, dragging the messy jumble of their lives behind them.

But in truth, life turns out to be more like the patchwork cloths-bits and pieces, odds and ends-people, places, things we never expected, never wanted, perhaps.

This is also, I believe, what America is at its best—a whole greater than the sum of it’s parts.

Love, marriage, divorce, infidelity… life was the same here as anywhere else, wasn’t?