Quotes from Barry Eisler

Reloader was a term he'd picked up from Dox. It meant someone so formidable you'd empty the whole magazine into him, eject, reload, and empty the second magazine, too, just to be sure.

But it seemed clever and careful was exactly what drew the attention of God's Eye.

There aren't many things we humans need to do. We need to eat, we need to drink, we need to make love. And the French attitude is, okay, we should do those things very well.

Saturn Devouring His Son

The teeming scene in front of the station made familiar Tokyo look deserted by comparison. The street stretching out before me between rows of crumbling low-rises and slumped office buildings looked like a river of people gushing through a ravine. Cars jerked through congested intersections, pedestrians flowing around them like T cells attacking a virus.

An indistinct cacophony blanketed the area like fog: people shouting into mobile phones, street-stall hawkers exhorting potential customers, cars and horns and jackhammers. A couple of pigeons soared from one rooftop to another, flapping their wings in seeming laughter at the seething mass below.

sublimation, a primitive part of her mind trying to propitiate her guilt over having failed to protect Nason. Over having inadvertently doomed her. 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.

Why are the most painful memories also the sweetest; why does the sweetness always draw us back no matter how long the pain might have kept us away beforehand? I don't know

I heard footsteps on the tile, then saw his profile as he emerged from the bathroom, wearing only a white tee shirt and matching boxer shorts.

Hot damn, look at him go! I am proud, proud to know that our great nation is being steered by men of such exceptional energy and passion. Not to mention rectitude.

May I join you?" she asked. Her English was lightly accented with something warm, maybe Spanish or Portuguese. "Please," I said, standing and pulling back a chair for her. "Is English all right?" "Of course," she said, looking at me closely. "You… you're American?" I nodded. "My parents are Japanese, but I grew up in America. I'm more comfortable in English.

I didn't know what I wanted. I trained at the Kodokan and reflected at quiet shrines and enjoyed my jazz clubs and coffee houses and whisky bars. I took long, nocturnal walks through the damascene city, and considered what I'd been part of, and what I'd almost caused. I wondered about my son and I missed Delilah. I thought about Horton. I made no decisions. I

Strangeland's confidence in her, the risks she was willing to run . . . it was all producing a roiling mess of emotion she couldn't deal with right now. She managed to push it away and handed

Her fingers were small in my hand but her grip was firm. I tried to place her age. Late twenties, maybe thirty. She looked young, but her dress and mannerisms were sophisticated.

But we rarely see what we prefer to overlook.

Diaz moved as though to get out. "No, ma'am," Dox said, scoping the area. "Tell me where the phone is and you stay put. Just in case there are any unfriendlies in the area." "Behind a book called Recursion, by Blake Crouch. Level three. Fiction.

Seriously protecting yourself calls for the annihilation of ties with society, ties that most people need the way they need oxygen.

If you want something you've never had before, you have to do something you've never done before.

I ordered another Springbank. She asked me questions: how I knew so much about single malt whisky, where I lived in the States, how many times I'd been to Tokyo. She was comfortable in her role and I let her play it.

It wasn't how far you fell, it was how high you bounced

I was taken aback by his gumption. He sounded more petulant than afraid. I realized this kid didn't understand the kind of trouble he was in. If he didn't tell me what I wanted to know I would have to adjust his attitude.

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. When

It was as though the real person had suddenly decided to reinhabit the hostess's body. Her eyes, her expression, her posture had all come alive, and again I felt that vital energy that had animated her dancing.

you might find yourself passing a lone octogenarian, his shoulders bent with the weight of age, his slippers shuffling along the cobblestones, his passage as timeless and resolute as the ancient city itself.