Brendan

“Fujiwara blamed Japan’s descent into militarism on its abandonment of samurai values and its embrace of prevailing western thought. In its quest to become a Great Power, it aped the colonial ways of that other island nation, Britain, he said. ‘I always say Japan should be extraordinary; it should not be an ordinary country. We became a normal country, just like other big nations. That’s all right for them. But we have to be isolated, especially mentally. For the past 200 years, after the industrial revolution, westerners relied too much on logical thinking. Even now, they tend to think that, if you really depend on logic and reason, then everything will be all right. But I don’t think so. You really need something more. You might say that Christianity is something that can come on top of those things. But for us Japanese, we don’t have a religion like Christianity or Islam. So we need to have something else – deep emotion. That is something we have had for twenty centuries.”
― David Pilling, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

“Yet from the outset the fascination with private detectives was mixed with aversion. They were untrained and unregulated and often had criminal records themselves. Beholden to paying clients, they were widely seen as surreptitious figures who burglarized people’s secrets. (The term “to detect” derived from the Latin verb “to unroof,” and because the devil, according to legend, allowed his henchmen to peer voyeuristically into houses by removing their roofs, detectives were known as “the devil’s disciples.”)”
― David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

“Perhaps I could blame youth for my friendship with Bon. What drives a fourteen-year-old to swear a blood oath to a blood brother? And more important, what makes a grown man believe in that oath? Should not the things that count, like ideology and political belief, the ripe fruit of our adulthood, matter more than the unripe ideals and illusions of youth? Let me propose that truth, or some measure of it, can be found in these youthful follies that we forget, to our loss, as adults.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“One must be grateful for one’s education no matter how it arrives.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer