Hawaii

No man leaves where he is and seeks a distant place unless he is in some respect a failure.

This is the greatest evil that grows out of a wrong act. Somebody always remembers it … in an evil way.

Why is it, Reverend Hale, that we must always laugh at our book, but always revere yours?

The chance emergence of the was nothing. Remember this. But its persistence and patient accumulation of stature were everything. Only by relentless effort did it establish its right to exist.

wherever a human being goes, there is a challenge. Be the best man you can, and your gods will look with favor upon you.

Therefore, men of Polynesia and Boston and China and Mount Fuji and the barrios of the Philippines, do not come to these islands empty-handed, or craven in spirit, or afraid to starve. There is no food here. In these islands there is no certainty. Bring your own food, your own gods, your own flowers and fruits and concepts. For if you come without resources to these islands you will perish... On these harsh terms the islands waited.

I live for the few minutes I can talk with a sensible human being, but every time I do, I feel worse than before.

how small he was and how wormy in manner,

Only a mind steeped in true love can write irony. The others write satire.

If you try it,” Whip said, “you’ll be thrown out on your inalienable ass.

Sometimes when the Japanese maids, in crisp white uniforms, had withdrawn, a Roosevelt appointee would ask timorously, “These Japanese, can they be trusted?” And The Fort invariably replied, “We’ve had Sumiko for eighteen years, and we’ve never known a better or more loyal maid.

in 1954 it looked as if a deep schism had been driven down the middle of our community, pitting Japanese against haole, but the Sakagawa boys had the courage to back away from that tempting, perilous course. They reconciled haole and Japanese, and it is to their credit that they did so.

the fundamental fact that law directs the ongoing of society. It is rooted in the past, determines the present, and protects the future.

John Whipple did not allow his anger at such treatment to obscure his judgment. In years of trading around the Pacific he had often met obstinate men and the cruel situations which they produce, and he had learned that in such confrontations his only chance of winning lay in doing exactly what in conscience ought to be done. It was by reliance upon this conviction that he had quietly made his way in such disparate jungles as Valparaiso, Batavia, Singapore and Honolulu.

When you are a citizen, the earth feels different.

during the forthcoming even emptier years, she would still be there, a haunting vision of the other half of life, the womanliness, the caretaking symbol, the majestic, lovely, receptive other half.

Patriotism is not a matter of the skin’s color. It is a matter of the heart.

when the moderates were driven out, the radicals moved in,

there were many ways to judge the acts of an institution, and the pragmatic way was not the worst, by any means.

Because a boy who could read would sooner or later come upon some book that would give him an idea, and a boy with an idea could accomplish almost anything.

You will have to live among Americans, and they despise most freedoms, so conform.

he could look at the evidence planted in the universe and from it derive a new concept, and a greater thing than this no mind can accomplish

but she possessed what was better than beauty: an absolutely realistic evaluation of life.