Alan Brennert Quotes

#1. It slowly dawned on the volunteers that they were not patients but subjects; separated from their friends and community in Kalaupapa, they felt like outcasts among outcasts.

Alan Brennert

#2. No land is more beautiful, and therefore more powerful. That is what I believe in, Aouli. I believe in Hawai'i. I believe in the land.
-Haleola

Alan Brennert

#3. Surrounded by darkness yet enfolded in light

Alan Brennert

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

Alan Brennert

#5. 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.

Alan Brennert

#6. 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.

Alan Brennert

#7. Isn't it strange, how one so afraid of contracting a fatal malady ... should so earnestly wish for death, as well?

Alan Brennert

#8. With wonder and a growing absence of fear she realized, I am more than I was an hour ago.

Alan Brennert

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

Alan Brennert

#10. Rachel found herself wishing that the week would never end-that her father could stay here forever-but knew he couldn't. If there was one thing she had learned in her brief time at Kalaupapa, it was that all things end.

Alan Brennert

#11. They toured the new hospital, the renovated and expanded McVeigh Home, and the (named without apparent irony) Bay View Home for the Blind and Helpless.

Alan Brennert

#12. An aching vacuum inside her sucking the air from her lungs. She hung her head and wept fiercely, the emptiness inside her growing larger not smaller; she felt as though it would grow so large it would suffocate her just as surely as the sea would have

Alan Brennert

#13. Quoting an old proverb: "An empty cart rattles loudly." she said. meaning, One who lacks substance boasts loudest.

Alan Brennert

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

Alan Brennert

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

Alan Brennert

#16. 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.

Alan Brennert

#17. And all they could do was sit, sleep, eat, and be reminded day after day, night after night, of their disease and eventual death.

Alan Brennert

#18. Old Korean adage, "Even jade has flaws." Or, in other words: Nothing in life is ever perfect.

Alan Brennert

#19. 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.

Alan Brennert

#20. She would follow her father over the horizon and down the other side, where the world lay hidden.

Alan Brennert

#21. How stupid could she be to think a clean person would love her
would risk death and decay and banishment for love!

Alan Brennert

#22. She had never been afraid of the dark, but then she had never known a dark like this before.

Alan Brennert

#23. - he took her in his arms and cradled her; offering her not God's comfort but his own, merely human, consolation.

Alan Brennert

#24. Carve the peg by looking at the hole.' Eddie looked at me blankly and I explained, 'An old Korean saying. It means, Do things to fit the circumstances.

Alan Brennert

#25. 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.

Alan Brennert

#26. She already felt dead in everything but name. What remained to be taken from her? She longed to be enfolded, welcomed, into the earth - to breathe no more, love no more, hurt no more

Alan Brennert

#27. 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.

Alan Brennert

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

Alan Brennert

#29. She bid me to look out on the lawn at the leper girls who were running on lame feet, playing croquet with crippled hands.
"There is beauty," she said, "in the least beautiful of things.

Alan Brennert

#30. 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.

Alan Brennert

#31. What's it like? Being married?
Cold feet. Middle of the night you're sleeping, suddenly, wham, you've got ice cold feet warming themselves on the back of your legs.

Alan Brennert

#32. SMILE - IT NO BROKE YOUR FACE!
-on a stone in Kalaupapa

Alan Brennert

#33. After a while the fear became a constant, cold companion, a simple fact of existence.

Alan Brennert