84 Quotes by Alan Brennert

Let the things of long ago drift away on the water

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

I'm lucky, you see: I had two mothers. One gave life to me; one raised me. But they both loved me. You know, some people don't even get that once... There's only one disadvantage, really, to having two mothers. You know twice the love... but you grieve twice as much.

Her grief was a storm, a driving rain falling too fast to be absorbed

The weeping of grown men and women, cries of hopelessness and loss, separation and misery. And in that collective lament, Ruth heard one closer by, muted in its shame: the sound of her own father's sobs, shocking in its newness, his familiar strength and solidity, like a once-sturdy oak, now riven with such grief and despair that it broke his daughter's heart.

Love, marriage, divorce, infidelity... life was the same here as anywhere else, wasn't? She realized now wrong she'd been; the pali wasn't a headstone and Kalaupapa wasn't a grave. 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.

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

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

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