"If your mind is a slave to every noise, do not blame the noise for your subservience," said Chiun, the Master of Sinanju. "It is not a master that makes a slave, but a slave who makes those about him a master."

"Thank you for a very merry Christmas, Little Father."

"If your heart remains with a white man's holiday, then perhaps I should stand on that bar with you lest you fall, for truly, not even the House of Sinanju can overcome treasured bad habits."

"Well, I'm not going ga-ga over the Feast of the Pig."

"It is not called the Feast of the Pig," said Chiun. "It is a day when those who feel obligated to someone who has given them much wisdom return some small little offering of thanksgiving."

"You're not getting Barbra Streisand," Remo said. "We don't give women like that around here."

"She would be good for bearing children. And seeing your shoddiness of performance, the House of Sinanju needs another male."

"She's not Korean, Little Father. She's as white as I am."

"For beauty, one makes an exception. The blood of Sinanju should overcome any inadequacies. And then I would get a pupil without learned bad habits and arrogance and talkativeness. Even the greatest of artists has difficulty moulding hardened clay."

Remo turned back to the cold wind. He knew its sound was there but he did not hear it. He knew the cold was there but he did not feel it. He knew the bridge was beneath him and around him but he did not sense it. He was moving along a thin bar at an outside angle above dark waters and his thoughts and feelings were the center of his balance. He could run for days like this, he felt, and though he was aware of the lights of cars moving at him and beside him, they were not in his world. His world was passing them faster and faster and as his world approached the far side of the bridge, he reversed it in a spin that stopped not with his feet because his bones could not support that sort of jarring pressure, but with the very stopping of his world. And then he was moving back toward Chiun, the Master of Sinanju.