Quotes from Barry Eisler

You must think of neither victory nor of defeat, but only of cutting and killing your enemy. I

the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, the first Gulf war.

My American and Japanese personalities are distinct, and I carry myself differently depending on which language I'm using and which mode I'm in.

But then, as seemed always to be the case when she found herself hit by a wave of happiness, or joy, or delight, there was an immediate undertow of sadness.

I hadn't expected her to follow this line of reasoning. I'm usually good at putting myself in the other person's shoes, anticipating his next move. But she had outplayed me on this one. Time to try to regain some initiative, give myself a second to think.

My mother had tried to raise me as a Catholic, but war had deracinated whatever meager plantings her efforts had achieved. No God ever would have stood silent spectator to what I saw in Vietnam. To what I did there. Either there was no God, or there was and he didn't give a damn.

The trick was to assume the worst and act accordingly.

Working out always took the edge off when he was feeling paranoid.

I learned a long time ago not to trust, that faith is to life what sticking your chin out is to boxing.

Most people find it hard to do two things at once, like complete a sentence and avoid a palm heel to the nose.

fait accompli

The walls flickered in the candlelight. The room felt close and warm, like an underground sanctuary.

I walked on, my footfalls melancholy, respectful of the thick silence around me. Unlike the surrounding city, Aoyama Bochi is changeless, and I had no difficulty finding what drew me despite the decades that had passed since I had last come here.

You start slow. You find the subject's limits and get him to spend some time there. He gets used to it. Before long, the limits have moved. You never take him more than a centimeter beyond. You make it feel it's his choice.

People talk about morality. Sometimes I think there's just what you can do, and what you can't. Well, I could. And I was going to.

It's a science. There are people out there who are experts at getting others to do tomorrow what was unthinkable today.

I waited a moment, then lowered myself, cross-legged, to the earth. Some of the graves were adorned with flowers, in various stages of freshness and decay. As though the dead could smell the bouquets.

I thought of Musashi, the master swordsman, who wrote, You must think of neither victory nor of defeat, but only of cutting and killing your enemy.

But she was also uneasy. She remembered when she'd been in college and had come across the Nietzsche quote: Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.

In some ways, the neighborhood was the poster child for bad zoning. There were shiny glass-and-steel condominiums across from corrugated and I-beam parking garages. Single-family homes perched alongside recycling plants and foundries. A new multistory school turned its proud granite façade away from its neighbor, a dilapidated relic of a car repair shop, like an ungrateful child ashamed of an ailing parent.

of eternity.

The Internet is a limitless library at your fingertips. It's a great place to start with the acquisition of knowledge. My process is to go to a place when I'm writing about it. Nothing captures the essence, feeling and flavor of a place better than when I'm actually there and doing the writing.

I love Japan, and Tokyo is my favorite city.

Paper publishers are doing everything they can to slow the transition to eBooks because, in a digital world, paper publishers' high hardback margins essentially disappear.