Quotes from Barry Eisler

Checking your six?" he said, still smiling. "I thought you wanted an airport because they're safe. What is it about me that scares people so much?

Is she your first girlfriend?" I asked, my tone gentle. "I told you, she's not really my girlfriend," he said, ducking the question. "If she's occupying enough of your attention to keep you in bed until the sun sets, I feel safe using the word as shorthand.

Medicine isn't supposed to taste good—that's what candy is for. Medicine is supposed to make you better.

If you focus on the risks, they'll multiply in your mind and eventually paralyze you. You want to focus on the task, instead, on doing what needs to be done.

the young man's blindness irreparable, his mistakes immutable, the consequences irreversible.

War is a part of human nature, and we Japanese are human. But we have never fought, we have certainly never built weapons of mass destruction, to convince the world of the rightness of an idea. It took America and its bastard twin, communism, to do that." He

What I was doing, I was sabotaging myself. Well, it was time I stopped.

You see, cancer is simply nature's way of making you want to die.' Tatsu.

Sometimes I think the urge to believe in our own worldview is our most powerful intellectual imperative, the mind's equivalent of feeding, fighting, and fornicating. People will eagerly twist facts into wholly unrecognizable shapes to fit them into existing suppositions. They'll ignore the obvious, select the irrelevant, and spin it all into a tapestry of self-deception, solely to justify an idea, no matter how impoverished

Your personality. You know, most people are like sheep. Nice, harmless creatures who want nothing more than to be left alone so they can graze. But then of course there are wolves. Who want nothing more than to eat the sheep." He looked at his soup, then back to her. "But there's a third kind of person. The sheepdog. Sheepdogs have fangs like wolves. But their instinct isn't predation. It's protection. All they want, what they live for, is to protect the flock.

we rarely see what we prefer to overlook.

Some vicious thing inside me stirred. I felt it in my gut, the back of my neck, my hands. 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.

right now. Today. I'd been foolish, a coward even, to have waited so

I could feel her soft shape, the heat of her, conducted with electric clarity through the wet of our clothes. I felt my body responding. I knew she felt it, too. Ah, shit.

Men use these words to frighten us, Livia would tell them. To intimidate and paralyze. We need to habituate to what upsets us so we can fight through it. Deny our attackers the weapon of their words.

Between her hand over my heart and her hips at my crotch, she might as well have been administering a polygraph.

the neighborhood was quiet, its colonial houses decaying in stoic dignity beneath the swaying palm trees.

gossiping, backbiting courtiers, and as he closed the mahogany door behind him and the heavy brass latch clacked into place, the room erupted into a dozen scheming conversations. Power was like a magnet, keeping everything rigid and straight and proper. But without the magnet, it all collapsed into disorganized scrap.

Denial has no survival value.' If you're going to play, you have to at least recognize what the game is.

sold to the public on false pretenses, high officials confessing to ordering torture in violation of treaty and domestic law, and an economic meltdown even former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan acknowledges involved massive fraud—and no one has been prosecuted, no one has gone to prison, and Americans continue to dutifully cast their votes for the Democratic/Republican duopoly responsible for these disasters.

I read it somewhere once." She laughed. "You did not." "I did. Okay, I wrote it down first. Then I read it. But still.

Is there any teacher better, more patient, more determined than fate?

Then she reached lower and started to ease my pants down. I stopped her so I could get my shoes and socks off first. Pants-pooled-at-the-ankles is too helpless a posture for me.

Karate moved slowly through the lobby. His gaze went to Belghazi and his eyes hardened in a way that would mean nothing to most people but that meant a great deal to me. From this gaze I understood Karate wasn't looking at a man. No. What I saw instead was a hunter acquiring a target.