Quotes from John Donohue

To train in the martial arts is like being apprenticed to frustration, to the burn of effort, and the unattainable criteria of perfection. There's no glamour, no reward beyond the ones you create in your own heart. You struggle along the path and your teacher goads you or challenges you, always three steps ahead and always waiting, his eyes betraying nothing but demanding everything. And you try to give it.

The truly wise know that what we really need are those things that permit our true natures to emerge.

You can often tell what style someone practices merely by looking at the type of knot someone has in the front of a hakama. Some iaido schools have elaborate systems for tying their hakama. My sensei uses a simple square knot: he's mostly concerned that the knot is properly placed and doesn't come undone. It's hard to be deadly while your pants are falling down.

Even in the washed out light of that place, the tears in Micky's eyes glittered like the last sparks of a dying star.

On good days I hope we were formed for a purpose, but there is also a deep throbbing, a grim Celtic warning that life can be either full or futile. And there is no sense to how that will be revealed; we graft meaning on our lives as best we can.

In the post-modern academic world, truth is often alleged to be relative.

Effort is its own reward.

People crave certainty. And control. We spend our lives erecting coping mechanisms, little games we play to preserve the illusion of safety.

I felt a tightness on the skin. A visceral type of cognition that I had experienced before. But this was stronger, more immediate: the certainty of something out there, just beyond the threshold of consciousness. It was the experience of haragei.

He looked off into the distance with narrowed eyes. Man of action, seeing things no one else does. "Let's just say we had indications…" and he let it dangle in the air, as if mystery were the ultimate justification.

I was sandwiched in between the Colonel and Hanrahan. I looked at the driver and nodded at the crowd in black shirts. "This the demo team, Sergeant?

We began to circle each other, looking for a tsuki, a gap in concentration, that would permit an attack.

When I started my studies years ago, I thought of myself as an academic with an interest in the martial arts. Then I met Yamashita. Now I've come to the awareness that I'm a martial artist with some advanced academic credentials. "We know there are people more qualified, Burke,

The realization of what was happening meant that I had to shift mental gears. There is, after all, fighting. And then there is fighting. It's a point I continually try to bring home to people in Yamashita's dojo. They don't really get it—it's something you have to experience for yourself. But it's not something I wish on anyone.

For our part, we labor on in the blind hope that we will somehow be plucked from anonymity and elevated to full-time status, where you work about nine months out of the year. So

gustatory avidity.