Jane Ardd

“They’ve four hundred thousand samurai between them now. Their base is Kyushu and that island’s safe from my grasp. Together those two could easily subjugate the whole island, then they have limitless troops, limitless food, all the ships necessary for an invasion, all the silk, and Nagasaki. Throughout the land there are perhaps another five or six hundred thousand Christians. Of these, more than half – the Jesuit Christian converts – are samurai, all salted nicely among the forces of all daimyos, a vast pool of potential traitors, spies, or assassins – should the priests order it. And why shouldn’t they? They’d get what they want above life itself: absolute power over all our souls, thus over the soul of this Land of the Gods – to inherit our earth and all that it contains – just as the Anjin-san has explained has already happened fifty times in his New World of theirs . . . They convert a king, then use him against his own kind, until all the land is swallowed up”
― James Clavell, Shogun

“Build a life worth living. I stare at this phrase on my ceiling every morning before I decide to get out of bed. I painted it a few years ago after completing a few months of dialectal behavioral therapy. It is a quote by Marsha Linehan, who created DBT. After therapy, I impulsively decided to paint it on my ceiling in black, as some sort of reminder to build a life worth living. I don’t regret painting it up there - well, not yet, at least.”
― Emma Thomas, Live for Me

“You can’t save anyone who wouldn’t save themselves without you. It’s the
hardest lesson to learn in life, take it from me.”
― Marc Jampole

“Colonel Aubertin and his two colleagues sat on a park bench in the private garden of Dorset Square. Rougemont sat between his two superiors, pleased that for once the commandant appeared to have had an abstemious lunch. “Major Vane-Stewart was telling me the other day that this was once the site of the first important cricket ground in London, established by the same Thomas Lord who later built the famous ground that bears his name, a few miles to the north of us in St. John’s Wood. There is a plaque recording this fact in that shed over there. In the middle of the square.”
“Cricket.” Angers spat out the words with disgust. “A stupid game played by idiots. Only the English could invent such a boring name.”
― Mark Ellis, The French Spy