Quotes from Barry Eisler

I should have known better. But we all have stupid moments—rationalizations, even blindness, born of weakness and human need.

Trust your gut. When you felt something was off, you had to believe that feeling, even if you couldn't articulate the basis.

Her English, though accented, was idiomatic. She would have learned it young enough to pick up the idiom, but not quite young enough to eradicate the accent.

Gavin de Becker had written a great book on the topic—The Gift of Fear.

And maybe on some level his approach was manipulative, but what mattered most was the way it made her feel. Like he understood her, without ever having to be heavy-handed about it.

Both women had been wearing earbuds—one of the many things Livia taught her self-defense students never to do, because demonstrating both that you can't hear and that you're too naïve to know better is a beacon to predators.

I felt the hairs on the back of my neck pop up, a fresh surge of adrenaline dump into my veins. My fight or flight reaction is finely honed, and this guy's presence was making it sing.

After all, to worry, at a minimum you have to care.

When your sword meets that of your enemy, you can never waver, but must instead attack with the complete resolution of your whole body… —Miyamoto Musashi, A Book of Five Rings

I briefly considered whether it could be a setup. If they were on to me, though, this was already a pretty perfect venue. They didn't have to convince me to go somewhere else.

He was a scary one, no doubt about it. And not just the ruined face. Even without the scarring, I would have recognized him. He exuded the same deadly air I had known, and respected, in Crazy Jake. The external scars were the least of what marked him for what he was.

It's a strange thing, having a child," he said. "It completely alters your most fundamental priorities. When my eldest daughter was born, I realized I would do anything—anything—to protect her. If I had to set myself on fire to save her from something, I would do it with the utmost relief and gratitude. It's quite a thing, quite a privilege, to care about someone so much that the measure of the worth of your own life is changed by it.

The clock's second hand swept past the twelve. I unloaded a final flurry of elbow strikes and stepped back. The adrenaline dump was largely depleted, but I still felt tense. Usually a workout helps with that. Not this time.

I wouldn't want to try to take this guy out with anything less than a scoped rifle. Which is something that's hard to confuse with expiration by natural causes. The hell with it, I thought. Risks are one thing. This looks like suicide. If Tatsu wanted him dead that much, I'd recommend a six-man squad and firearms. Much as I would have liked to do something to buy Tatsu's continued goodwill, this one wasn't worth it.

Caligula ne demiÅŸti? Oderint dum meduant. Bizden korktuklar? sürece, b?rak?n bizden nefret etsinler.

I thought of an expression my father had once told me: Be good to people on your way up. You may meet them again on your way down.

Life can only be understood backward; but it must be lived forward. —Kierkegaard

For was it not true that when the student is ready, the teacher appears?

That night I took a long, wandering walk through Tokyo. I was restless and felt the need to move, to let the city's currents carry me where they would.

Treat me well, and I'll treat you better. Treat me badly, and I'll treat you worse.

unconscious expectations were simply assumptions based primarily on foolish prejudice, itself likely the product of a lack of thought and experience

Naomi, you think this is all an accident? It's a science. There are people out there who are experts at getting others to do tomorrow what was unthinkable today.

Sigur Rós's Samskeyti

I was impressed, although unsurprised. She was obviously in the habit of thinking operationally, and was as matter-of-fact about it as she was effective. I'd already concluded she was trained. To that assessment I now added a probable minimum of several years of field experience.