84 Quotes by Alan Brennert

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.

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

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.

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

Rachel barely noticed any of it, and not just because she was insulated by the press of bodies on every side fo her. She paid little mind to the deck buckling beneath her like a maddened mule, or even to the stink of feces and urine that the exiles were forced to void where they sat. She was simply numb, her mind having absorbed all the fear it could, like a sponge saturated with water: after a while the fear became a constant, cold companion, a simple fact of existence.

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.

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.

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

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.