Kiana Davenport Quotes

What are they doing?' Mathys cried.
'They are mating, lad. And what a wondrous thing.'
Flukes grinding back and forth somewhere in the depths their song became a symphony vibrating across the ocean and ships in other latitudes vibrated and maybe continents vibrated and suddenly pressed close so close they looked like giantly godly Siamates and they drove themselves up and up rising out of the water all of them the massiveness the length of them high high into the blue above the blue below and they were blue and blue oceans sluicing down their sides and joined yes joined and everything all earthly things were small and they just stood there in the sky a young boys memory and then they dove back down into other atmospheres a deafening resounding roar that shook the timbers of the ship and shook the hearts of watching men and threw them to their knees.

He had thought providing for his wife was the greatest expression of devotion. Somehow it hadn't sufficed. How could I have loved her more? I never touched another woman. His sorrow was this: There was something she had needed, something she had tried to call forth from within him, that he did not possess.

Life is running backwards. What did I do wrong?

Time, the thing we can't beat back ... Yet, time is also what it takes to heal, what it takes for certain memory cells to die.
Maybe time doesn't heal. Maybe it doesn't even pass. We pass through time, and come out stunned, so rage, and memory, are blurred.

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

He thinks of all he has seen and learned: that the universe is indifferent to our human endeavors, that what gives our lives meaning is the passion that invades our hearts and burns in us, and maybe even destroys us.

We love that which we corrupt.

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 women's rights over their bodies, and their destinies. And lastly, though she had a fondness for men, she felt women 'basically didn't need them.

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

I keep forgetting were Pono's girls. Maybe we're not suppose to be happy.'
'Then we'll pretend to be,' Rachel said. ' We'll make it a habit, no matter what.'
That's all we can do, Jess thought. Live in readiness for whatever comes.

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

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

Beware of logic.

Will once said each galaxy has about a hundred billion stars. He said that ninety-eight percent of what exists around us we can't even see. Sometimes I let go and float out there, staring back at earth. I lose track of time. Will told me to forget time, that it was relative. He said light was the thing. At the speed of light, time stands still. It's the wild card. It makes things happen. (The Speed of Light)

You think knowing things will solve your private little griefs?

There are women locked in my womb forever, the memory of their birth. All I can do now is liberate the fruit of their wombs. And it may be too late.

She tried to show them how women could do anything, and do it competently. How problems could be worked out if they ignored what people said and did what conscience required.

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.

So much easier to give. I detest asking.

After endless textbook readings and interviewing 'experts,' I still could not grasp the full concept of 'love,' the mystique of it, why people killed for it, or died for it. Even the experts were confused. Biologists said the phenomenom we called love was just a bombardment of chemicals that affected our brain: dopamine, which grabbed us the throat in the guise of lust, and oxytocin, which settled us down to the mundane complacencies of marriage. On the other hand, Behaviorists thought love was really the search for God. No one agreed. The thing most humans thought we knew about love, we didn't know at all. And all that we did not know was astonishing. Even more astonishing was what passed for love.

Recognizing who you are is not the subtext of a life. It's the main point.