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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”