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

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.

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?

You’ll never get ahead of anyone as long as you try to get even with him.

A lifetime contract for a coach means if you’re ahead in the third quarter and moving the ball, they can’t fire you.

The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it.

Every time there has been an effort by the Haitian people to overcome the misery and poverty that comes from 200 years of bitter attacks, really bitter, the U.S. steps in and blocks it.

A simple life, a good life. And think about moving the whole human race ahead a step, or a few steps.

I enjoy competition. I enjoy challenges. If a challenge is in front of me and it appeals to me, I will go ahead and conquer it.

When I do something, I do it full steam ahead.

Time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past.