Quotes by Kiana Davenport

God not da faddah, he just the spoiled moody child, but you got to go trough him to get to da real power, his mama, Moter God. She da real Almighty! She run da heavens alone. Original single parent. When somethin bad happen, usually mean she let God try his hand, and he screw up plenny. You need something important, you go directly Moter God. Jesus, Mary, Joseph? Dey just small potatoes, part of the chorus, neh?

Does childhood really happen? Do we imagine it? Everyone remembers something else....

She was kahuna, creating more life around her than was actually there, heightening the momentousness of each living thing by simply gazing upon it.

The diaries also revealed a deeply sensitive, intelligent woman, one who had hoped to start a college for Hawaiian women, affording them the same education as men. She had planned to open a bank for women, enabling them to handle their own financial affairs. She recognized the need for more female lawyers and physicians, the need for womens rights over their bodies, and their destinies. And lastly, though she had a fondness for men, she felt women basically didnt need them.

They would no longer be time-bound, that they were free to live in the future, the past, in fantasy. She had been a woman preparing to live, not living.

You think knowing things will solve your private little griefs?

Time, the thing we cant beat back... Yet, time is also what it takes to heal, what it takes for certain memory cells to die. Maybe time doesnt heal. Maybe it doesnt even pass. We pass through time, and come out stunned, so rage, and memory, are blurred.

Everything breaks down but desire. And because we are old, doctors try to shame that out of us. Young punks! Lose ones youth, and doctors take it as axiomatic that youve lost your mind, your balls.

We love that which we corrupt.

When you hate something for twenty years, you get to know it well.

Inside the terminal at Keahole, they sat waiting to board, watching husky Hawaiians load luggage onto baggage ramps. Arriving tourists smiled at their dark, muscled bodies, handsome full-featured faces, the ease with which they lifted things of bulk and weight. Departing tourists took snapshots of them. Thats how they see us, Pono whispered. Porters, servants. Hula Dancers, clowns. They never see us as we are, complex, ambiguous, inspired humans. Not all haole see us that way...Jess argued. Vanya stared at her. Yes, all Haole and every foreigner who comes here puts us in one of two categories: The malignant stereotype of vicious, drunken, do-nothing kanaka and their loose-hipped, whoring wahine. Or, the benign stereotype of the childlike, tourist-loving, bare-foot, aloha-spirit natives.

Got something to do with guilt, Toro said. Her mother,neh? Guilt. Longing. Got something to do with all of us.

Beware of logic.

So much easier to give. I detest asking.

Common sense. Mothers are the last riddle, the worst horror, the only consolation.

Recognizing who you are is not the subtext of a life. Its the main point.