Quotes from Barry Eisler

There was a time when I didn't seem to need such things, when I would have been amused and perhaps even vaguely disgusted at the notion of living like some sort of psychic vampire, a lingering revenant pressed up against one-way glass, looking with forlorn and futile eyes at the ordinary life fate had denied him.

The front door opened again. I glanced up and saw Karate. Christ, I thought. The gang's all here.

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

There's a saying I like. 'Denial has no survival value.' If you're going to play, you have to at least recognize what the game is.

The months and days are the travelers of eternity. —Bash?

Shoganai," I said. Literally, There is no way of doing it. "Yes," he said, nodding. "Elsewhere they have Cest la vie, or That's life.

People like to say the West is a guilt-based culture, while that of Japan is based on shame, with the chief distinction being that the former is an internalized emotion while the latter depends on the presence of a group. But

I sighed. Two goodbyes in one night. It was depressing. And it wasn't as though I had a whole Rolodex full of friends. But no sense being sentimental about it. Sentiment is stupid.

I've gotten used to hoping for so little that I seem to have lost any natural immunity to the emotion's infection.

Asian face and local language skills to handle the cash. I had just returned to the States from Vietnam, having left the military under a cloud, the origins of which I was able to understand only years later. My mother, the American half of the marriage, had just died; I had no brothers or sisters;

long-ago lifetime.

It seemed he'd recently learned the value of playing up the difficulty of accomplishing whatever he was tasked with, the better to play the hero when he subsequently pulled it off. He was overusing the technique the way a child overuses a new word.

Three meters. I felt a fresh adrenaline dump in my torso, my limbs. His partners must have seen his face. Their shoulders tensed, their heads began to turn. Two meters. The guy to my right was closest. He was turning to his left, toward whatever had made his partner start to bug out. I saw the left side of his face as he came around, everything moving slowly through my adrenalized vision.

That I was apparently into body building at all at this stage in my life probably meant affairs with young women, for whom a youthful physique might ameliorate the unavoidable emotional consequences of sleeping with an older man in what at root would be little more than an exchange of sex and the illusion of immortality for Ferragamo handbags and the other implicit currencies of such arrangements. All of which the yakuza would understand, and even respect.

His gal had thrown down, and he was going to follow her wherever that led.

He stumbled and managed to get out a suppressed pistol, trying at the same time to regain his balance. But his motor skills were suffering from a large and probably insufficiently familiar dose of adrenaline, and the long suppressor made for an equally long draw. He bobbled the gun, and in that second I was on him.

the Condor. "I don't interest myself in why. I think more often in terms of when. Sometimes where. Always how much.

My mother would have wanted me to say a prayer, crossing myself at its conclusion, and had this been her grave, I would have done so. But such a western ritual would have been an insult to my father in his life, and why would I do something to offend him now? I smiled. It was hard to avoid that kind of thinking. My father was dead. Still, I offered no prayer.

Context had reinforced familiarity, and familiarity had blinded them to new possibilities.

One night, someone I hadn't seen before, no doubt one of the club's civilian members who liked the location and thought that rubbing elbows with reputed gangsters made them tougher by osmosis

A mole could only avoid and evade the monitoring systems of which he was aware. Which made it crucial that almost no one be permitted to see the whole picture. Within

He returned a moment later, alone, and, after taking a moment to catch his breath, resumed his rightful place on the bench without looking at anyone else in the room. Everyone returned to what they were doing: his affiliates, because they didn't care; the civilians, because they were unnerved. It was as though nothing had happened, though the pervading silence indicated that indeed something had.

using the chrome and glass around me to gauge whether there was anyone to my rear trying to keep up.

Kanezaki," I said. He spun, startled to hear my voice so close. "Shit," he said, perhaps a little embarrassed. I smiled. He looked a little older than he had the last time I had seen him, leaner, more seasoned. The wire-rimmed glasses no longer made him look bookish. Instead, they gave his face… focus, somehow. Precision.