Quotes from James Clavell

Ah, Anjin-san, that's because you're thinking in your own language. To understand Japanese you have to think Japanese. Don't forget our language is the language of the infinite. It's all so simple, Anjin-san. Just change your concept of the world. Japanese is just learning a new art, detached from the world Ã¢â'¬Â¦ It's all so simple.

When a man's pride is injured, death is a small price to repay the insult.

Patience means restraining yourself. There are seven emotions, neh? Joy, anger, anxiety, adoration, grief, fear, and hate. If a man doesn't give way to these, he's patient.

his mind docketing the important things for future transcription.

The earth's round, like an orange, but this map is like its skin, cut off in ovals, north to south, laid flat and stretched a bit at the top and bottom. A Dutchman called Mercator invented the way to do this accurately twenty years ago. It's the first accurate world map.

to think bad thoughts is really the easiest thing in the world. If you leave your mind to itself it will spiral you down into the ever-increasing unhappiness. To think good thoughts, however,requires effort. This is one of the things that discipline - training - is about. So, train your mind to dwell on sweet perfumes...

It's amputate or die. Simple. And when it comes down to it, you can't die. Not yet. Once you're born, you are obligated to survive. At all costs.

Ronin were landless or masterless peasant-soldiers or samurai who, through dishonor or the loss of their masters, were forced to wander the land until some other lord would accept their services.

Kill, torture, burn! Just so long as it's in the name of God, you're all right. What a lot of hypocrisy! Don't give me faith! It's nothing!

The sky Scorched by the sun, Weeps Fecund tears.

They put me with a blind monk who taught me how to massage and to see again with my fingers. Now my fingers tell me more than my eyes used to, I think.

The point is we both know life and understand death—and both believe treatment in hell and everywhere else depends on money.

You don't know for certain about God until you're dead.

I send you my laughter. May Buddha bless thee and thine.

You must be patient before you criticize.

Russia's just trying to solve her own problems, Mr. Dunross, one of them's the U.S. containment policy. They just want to be left alone and not surrounded by highly emotional Americans with their overfed hands on nuclear triggers.

Look at this sunset, it's beautiful, neh? This sunset exists. Tomorrow does not exist. There is only now. Please look. It is so beautiful and it will never happen ever again, never, not this sunset, never in all infinity.

Christianity is a religion. Not a political ideology.

What are clouds But an excuse for the sky? What is life But an escape from death?

Now Cuba's nicely safe, thank you very much, where it'll grow, expand and eventually infect all South America. Safe for Soviet subs, ships, aircraft.… Christ almighty that's certainly a marvelous victory!

he's not very pro-American and it drives him mad that the British Empire's no more, that the U.S. is arbiter of the world's fate and making obvious mistakes

It's a hard life for a woman, Felicity," he had said before. And she had said, "Any life is hard for a woman.

They're wise in China. There the first of a dynasty's always a peasant or the son of a peasant, and the throne's always taken by force with bloody hands. No hereditary caste there—isn't that China's strength?

A fine moon rode the sky and he could see the dark marks on its face and he wondered absently if the dark was land and the rest ice and snow, and why the moon was there, and who lived there.