“Despair overthrown often turns us in mad directions.”

Katherine Kressmann Taylor, Address Unknown

“…despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt.”

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Behind everything stands desire, and you must find out your desire.”

James Stephens, Desire

“May the Lord watch between me and thee

While we are absent, one from another,

Amen!”

Virginia Hamilton, The House of Dies Drear

“Short cuts make delays, but inns make longer ones.”

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“We find comfort, we find numbness, we learn feats, to deceive others.”

Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“Fair speech may hide a foul heart.”

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

“A knavish speech sleeps in a foolish ear.”

William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“That is the worst thing of all, to discover that all these wondrous things you thought were yours alone are special to someone else.”

P.S. Somtow, Jasmine Nights

“Death is the final isolation, but from what, from what?”

Peter Matthiessen, At Play in the Fields of the Lord

“A man’s half licked when he says he is. An’ you’re half eaten from the way you’re goin’ on about it.”

Jack London, White Fang

“We each owe a death. There’s no exception.”

The Green Mile

“As a race we had allowed ourselves to become accustomed to the idea that the proper way to die is in bed, at a ripe age. It is a delusion. The normal end for all creatures comes suddenly.”

John Wyndham, The Kraken Wakes

“For Saigo, as for all Japanese warriors from time immemorial, there were only two honorable ways to die: in battle or by one’s own hand with calmness and ritual. To die otherwise would mean terrible, insupportable shame throughout eternity, an awful karma brought into the next life, or, far worse, carried into the infinity of limbo.”

Eric Van Lustbader, The Ninja

“Maybe staring death in the face makes cowards out of everyone.”

Eiji Yoshikawa, Musashi – Book One: The Way of the Samurai

“People die everywhere, everyday.”

Harold Robbins, Stiletto

“On the contrary, he might have even looked forward to it, knowing that the importance of death lay not in the dying itself but in the manner of one’s death. How one died was recorded by history and one was remembered as much for the manner of one’s death as for one’s life.”

Eric Van Lustbader, The Ninja

“A century ago, when Admiral Perry’s American fleet opened the nation, Japan was a feudal society. The Japanese realized they had to change, and they did. Starting in the 1860s, they brought in thousands of Western specialists to advise them on how to change their government and their industries. The entire society underwent a revolution. There was a second convulsion, equally dramatic, after World War II.”

Michael Crichton, Rising Sun

“Japan is not a Western industrial state; it is organized quite differently. And the Japanese have invented a new kind of trade – adversarial trade, trade like war, trade intended to wipe out the competition – which America has failed to understand for several decades.”

Michael Crichton, Rising Sun

“Sooner or later, the United States must come to grips with the fact that Japan has become the leading industrial nation in the world. The Japanese have the longest lifespam. They have the highest employment, the highest literacy, the smallest gap between rich and poor. Their manufactured products have the highest quality. They have the best food.”

Michael Crichton, Rising Sun