James Clavell Quotes

All his life he had heard legends told among pilots and sailormen about the incredible riches of Portugal's secret empire in the East, how they had by now converted the heathens to Catholicism and so held them in bondage, where gold was as cheap as pig iron, and emeralds, rubies, diamonds, and sapphires as plentiful as pebbles on a beach. If the Catholic part's true, he told himself, perhaps the rest is too.

Remember that fortune and misfortune should be left to heaven and natural law. They are not to be bough by prayer or any cunning device to be thought of by any man or self-styled saint. p848

Your old teacher never explained anything to you? I don't think that was very good. Not to explain. You can always ask me anything. That's what a real teacher should do.

Curious, Toranaga thought, how women can change like chameleons — one moment ugly, the next attractive, sometimes even beautiful, though in reality they’re not.

Oare ce-s nourii
Daca nu o justificare a cerului?
Oare ce-i viata
Daca nu o amanare a mortii?

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.

Godrot opium, he thought. But he knew that his life was inexorably tied to opium — and that without it neither The Noble House nor the British Empire could exist.

Didn’t JFK give Khrushchev a written promise not to invade Cuba, not to permit an invasion from American territory — or from any other place in the Western Hemisphere? Written, by God! So now, a hostile European power, Soviet Russia, totally against your Monroe Doctrine, is openly established ninety miles off your coast, the borders of which are guaranteed in writing by your own President and ratified by your own Congress. The Big K pulled off a colossal coup never duplicated in your whole history. And all for nothing!

Help! Help me! Please help me! Help me!

"Wars are fought by teenagers, you realize that. They really ought to be fought by the politicians and old people who start these wars." (Interview with Don Swaim of CBS Radio-1986)

There is no dignity for either the sufferer or the torturer

did. But he was glad her head was deep in his shoulder greatcoat. Again he craned around and caught sight of it, slightly aft and lying flat in the water, now seeming to

All gods bear witness! The Jade Gate and the One-Eyed Monk are truly yin and yang, truly everlasting, truly godlike, both insatiable however much one consumes the other.

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.

Time has no single measure, that time can be like frost or lightning or a tear or siege or storm or sunset, or even a rock.