“And sometimes she would dream again of being Namakaokahai'i, her waves rolling across burled coral beds, scattering moonlight, cresting higher and higher the farther she traveled over the reef. She was a colossus of water and motion soaring toward the black crescent of 'Awahuua Bay, her soul perched on the curling lip of the wave, riding it in the only way she could now; she felt the mana, the power in her waves, felt the rumble in her ocean depths.....”

“How stupid could she be to think a clean person would love her -- would risk death and decay and banishment for love!”

“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.”

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

“...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.”

“She saw the light again. With some irony in her interrogation, for when one woke at all, one's relations changed, she looked at the steady light, the pitiless, the remorseless, which was so much her, yet so little her, which had her at its beck and call (she woke in the night and saw it bent across their bed, stroking the floor), but for all that she thought, watching it with fascination, hypnotised, as if it were stroking with its silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain whose bursting would flood her with delight, she had known happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!”

“When she told a story, she rolled her eyes and waved her head and was very dramatic.”