“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“None of the patients could say the experiments didn't yield some benefits. It was the way the experiments were conducted that grated: with cold, clinical detachment. Masks, gloves, and carbolic acid were the order of the day fora ll staff, and while this may have been prudent it only made isolated people feel even more isolated.”

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

“...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.”