A lot of bull that’s worshipped as the be-all and end-all of existence. So much of ‘normal, civilized’ life is bull that you can’t imagine it. For us ex-Changi-ites—we’re lucky, we’re cleansed, we kno...
You would think they would be happy fornicators like normal persons. But they are not, they have so many cobwebs in their heads that somehow fornication is not our Most Heavenly Pleasure, but some kin...
Time has no single measure, that time can be like frost or lightning or a tear or siege or storm or sunset, or even like a rock.
Those who are young will take risks which even the devil would pass by.
No man ever willingly marries his mistress.
Yes. My ship'll be like her, he promised himself. She'll be trim and miniature and perfect like a Yoshitomo blade, and that's the best in the world, and just as dangerous. Next year she'll take a priz...
When a man's pride is injured, death is a small price to repay the insult.
We have a saying that time has no single measure, that time can be like frost or lightning or a tear or siege or storm or sunset, or even like a rock.
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.
There can only be one Tai-Pan.
There are no buts, my son. True there are degrees of honor — but one man can have only one code. Do what you like. It's your choice. Some things a man must decide for himself. Sometimes you have to ad...
Sometimes it's wiser to give a quarry extra line -- that's how to catch a fish, neh?
It is sometimes wise to be abstract.
If you leave your mind to itself it will spiral you down into ever-increasing unhappiness. To think good thoughts, however, requires effort. This is one of the things that discipline—training—is about...
I really don’t understand them, the capitalists. They delude themselves. We’re openly committed to consume them but they give us the means to do it.
Damn what you like, Pieterzoon. But don’t damn liquor. It’s the stuff of life!
Christianity is a religion. Not a political ideology.
An army of helpers for the twenty-eight cooks were preparing the meats and vegetables, plucking chickens, killing fresh fish and lobsters and crabs and cleaning them, doing the thousand tasks that Chi...
All comes to him who waits—and works.
After all those horrors at Changi, you don’t detest them? After a pause Peter Marlowe shook his head. I don’t detest anyone. Even Grey. It takes all of my mind and energy to appreciate that I’m alive.