James Clavell Quotes

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.

Horses are far worse than men for treachery...

Love is a Christian word, Anjin-san. Love is a Christian thought, a Christian ideal. We have no word for 'love' as I understand you to mean it. Duty, loyalty, honor, respect, desire, those words and thoughts are what we have, all that we need.

Put aside your sadness. Life is all sadness.

Gods are like people. They believe anything if you tell them right way.

Without privacy, civilized life could not exist.

All comes to him who waits — and works.

Isn’t it only through laughter that we become one with the gods and thus can endure life and can overcome all the horror and waste and suffering here on earth? Like tonight, watching all those brave men meet their fate here, on this shore, on this gentle night, through a karma ordained a thousand lifetimes ago, or perhaps even one. Isn’t it only through laughter we can stay human?

love is like the sea, sometimes calm and sometimes stormy; it’s dangerous, beautiful, death-dealing, life-giving. But never permanent, everchanging.

And yet you have faith in the King,” Father Donovan said quietly.

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.

Lend a little and you have a debtor — lend a lot and you have a partner!

I'll thank you to remember that not so many years ago men were burned at the stake just for saying the earth went round the sun!

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

Sometimes it's wiser to give a quarry extra line — that's how to catch a fish, neh?