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

Hawai’i has often been called a melting pot, but I think of it more as a ‘mixed plate’—a scoop of rice with gravy, a scoop of macaroni salad, a piece of mahi-mahi, and a side of kimchi.

Fear is our boon companion but never our master.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Many filmmakers have made resurgent work, and I was just a little ahead of the time.

Without the anticipation of better things ahead, we will have no heart for the journey.

I’ll take a break for a couple weeks for a project that is paying me money like a television project which I try to stay away from just to stay financially ahead of the game.

Pre-heat the oven? Really? If I was the sort of person who planned ahead

Focus on the moment, not the monsters that may or may not be up ahead.

In science, the best precept is to alter and exchange our ideas as fast as science moves ahead.

Ruminating about the past will get you nowhere. So go ahead and learn from the past whatever you can, and then put it behind you.

Baseball is like a poker game. Nobody wants to quit when he’s losing; nobody wants you to quit when you’re ahead.