Quotes from Barry Eisler

Power was like a magnet, keeping everything rigid and straight and proper. But without the magnet, it all collapsed into disorganized scrap.

It was only later that I came to learn how dangerous it is to allow yourself to be seduced by that first attractive theory. If you don't keep testing for alternatives, you might wind up satisfying yourself with, and proceeding on, what's no more than a partial truth. And a partial truth, I would understand soon enough, can be more dangerous than a lie.

Now it was "our purpose," something she taught her women's self-defense students to recognize as "forced teaming," when a person suggests he has something in common with his intended victim to get her to drop her guard.

I knew from her deportment she was trained. Therefore likely to be working with an organization, rather than on some sort of private mission.

For the first time I saw her lose a little poise. Her head retracted a fraction in a movement that was not quite a flinch, and her eyes dilated in a way that told me she'd just received a little helping of adrenaline.

when fighting monsters, you yourself do

I realized my knowledge of that potentially damning evidence gave Delilah a reason to want me out of the way. "Out of the way" might take a variety of different forms, of course, but none of them would be particularly attractive from my standpoint

when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

Trauma never went away. You could try to block it, or bury it, or bludgeon it into submission. But something with that much power couldn't really be contained. The best you could hope for was a way to channel it.

Some people just need a routine, and refuse to accept the consequences of predictability. In my experience, these people tend to get culled, often sooner, sometimes later. It's a Darwinian world out there.

But accurate insights might have helped me. Medicine isn't supposed to taste good—that's what candy is for. Medicine is supposed to make you better.

I pulled on a pair of shorts and did two hundred and fifty Hindu push-ups, five hundred Hindu squats, several minutes of neck bridges, front and back, and a variety of other bodyweight calisthenics and stretches. What you can get done with nothing more than a floor, your bodyweight, and gravity in thirty minutes of nonstop activity would put the fitness equipment industry out of business if people caught on.

societies are like organisms, and no organism is invulnerable to disease. What matters is whether an organism can mount an effective defense when it finds itself under attack. In Japan, the virus of corruption has attacked the immune system itself, like a societal form of AIDS. Consequently, the body has lost its ability to defend itself.

Jean-Louis Murat, Patricia Kaas

I smiled. You mean, to play it the way you would. Yes, that was probably true. Again, she would be coming to similar conclusions, mutatis mutandis, as the lawyers like to say, about me.

If he were a philosopher king or a benevolent dictator, the only jobs he thought he might enjoy more than his current occupation, he'd have a rule that you could only authorize a war if you were actually going to go off and personally fight it. That'd get the politicians singing "Kumbaya" right quick.

It might be beneficial for him occasionally to be reminded that I work for myself. That he was a stagehand, not one of the actors.

John O'Hara's novel.

One of the things Livia pounded home with her students was the dictum Trust your gut. When you felt something was off, you had to believe that feeling, even if you couldn't articulate the basis. Gavin de Becker had written a great book on the topic—The Gift of Fear.

Look at the way the FBI had nailed General Petraeus when he was director of Central Intelligence, by focusing on the email account he was using with his lover.

He laughed at that, which was good. I needed him to understand who was in charge, but didn't want to beat him down too hard. His goodwill, his naïve sense of fairness, was a potential asset, and not something to toss away needlessly.

America has always needed such transcendental notions to bind together its citizens, who have come from different cultures all over the world. And Americans are then driven to prove the universality of these ideas, and so their validity, by aggressively converting other cultures. In a religious context, this behavior would be recognized as missionary in its origins and effect.

The room was large, and largely empty. The pace would pick up later in the evening. For now, the action comprised just a few lonely souls. They seemed lost in the expanse of the room, their play joyless, desultory, as though they'd been looking for a livelier party and found themselves stuck with this one instead.

I had such a strong awareness that one day, I was going to be gone, but the trees would still be here, the moon would still be above them, shining down, and it made me cry, but a good kind of crying, because I knew it had to be that way. I had to accept it because that's the way things are. Things end. That's mono no aware.