Anthony Knopp

“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

“Edward had once felt that a vineyard rolling up a mountainside over which the sun was setting was the most glorious thing he’d ever seen, but now that memory paled in comparison to the transcendent garden of life bursting forth down below.”
― Steven Decker, One More Life to Live

“In darkness, in any light after dusk, you can slit a vein and the blood is black.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“There was nothing ordinary about Ossie May. She was tall, sexy, smart, and pretty. Her looks and personality were her drawing cards. The flip side was her temperament. She was beauty and rage sandwiched together, and she must have invented cussing. She would unload swear word after swear word in rapid succession. There had to be a law against such offensive language.”
― Harold Phifer, Surviving Chaos: How I Found Peace at A Beach Bar