Shark Dialogues Quotes

“She was kahuna, creating more life around her than was actually there, heightening the momentousness of each living thing by simply gazing upon it.”
― Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues

“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.
'That's 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.”
― Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues

“We love that which we corrupt.”
― Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues

“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.”
― Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues

“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.”
― Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues

“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.”
― Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues

“Beware of logic.”
― Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues

“Common sense. Mothers are the last riddle, the worst horror, the only consolation.”
― Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues

“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.”
― Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues

“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.”
― Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues

“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.”
― Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues

“They had left the mountains and entered the world, and he became a predator. She had survived by playing dead.”
― Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues

“I used to think Ming was her favorite. But she’s grown too private, too remote. Rachel is lost. And I am too haolefied, what my mother taught me, so we could survive in that other world, the one that killed her”
― Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues

“She would have to learn the lesson every day: that, sometimes, all that will define a person — instill within them dignity and purpose — all the human answers, are frozen in a few moments, a few days, and all the days to come are just a looking back.”
― Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues

“I wonder...if a life lived only in the mind is any less intense? If all the senses are engaged what is lost, but fact?”
― Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues

“Sometimes she even wore cardigans, what she felt women wore when their sex life was over.”
― Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues

“Perhaps she wrote that life is really lived through dreams and intuitions, not fate and circumstance.”
― Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues

“God not da faddah, he just the spoiled moody child, but you got to go t'rough him to get to da real power, his mama, Mot'er 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 Mot'er God. Jesus, Mary, Joseph? Dey just small potatoes, part of the chorus, neh?”
― Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues

“Does childhood really happen? Do we imagine it? Everyone remembers something else....”
― Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues

“Pono always say slow-motion vulgar.”
― Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues

“Sometimes, child, we die in metaphor.”
― Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues

“You think knowing things will solve your private little griefs?”
― Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues

“So much easier to give. I detest asking.”
― Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues

“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.”
― Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues

“Got something to do with guilt,' Toro said. 'Her mother,neh?'
'Guilt. Longing. Got something to do with all of us.”
― Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues

“When you hate something for twenty years, you get to know it well.”
― Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues

“Life is running backwards. What did I do wrong?”
― Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues

“She was re-creating herself, shedding one skin for another.”
― Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues

“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.”
― Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues

“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.”
― Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues