Quotes from Barry Eisler

The facility occupied the ground floor of a gray commercial building hemmed in by rusting fire escapes and choked with high-tension wires that clung to the structure's façade like rotting vegetation.

You've looked into the abyss, and can feel it looking back still;

told you, we're rebuilding. There's you, there's Larison, I hope, and there are a few others. And there are two in particular I want you to track down." "Who?" "A former marine sniper, goes by the name Dox, is one." "Who's the other?" Hort took a sip of wine. "The same man who taught me about honne and tatemae. A half-Japanese former soldier gone freelance, named Rain. John

Tatsu had pursued me for years, but more recently we had managed to achieve an improbable entente.

His eyes were still on me, but they no longer perceived. I stepped back, out of their sightless ambit, and paused to observe the scene. It looked like what it almost was: a weightlifting addict, alone and late at night, tries to handle more than he can, gets caught under the bar, suffocates and dies there. A bizarre accident.

Within days, perhaps hours, the discarded remnants of this last job would have been bleached of any trace of their origins, each just another nameless, colorless item among nameless, colorless souls, the flotsam and jetsam of loneliness and despair that fall from time to time into Tokyo's collective blind spot, and from there into oblivion.

The next morning, I worked out at Murakami's dojo in Asakusa. When I arrived, the men who were already training paused and gave me a low collective bow—a sign of their respect for the way I had dispatched Adonis. After that, I was treated in a dozen subtle ways with deference that bordered on awe. Even Washio, older than I and with a much longer and deeper association with the dojo, was using different verb forms to indicate that he now considered me his superior.

Three guys just tried to kill me in Hong Kong." "What?" "Three guys just tried to kill me in Hong Kong." "I heard you. Are you serious?" I didn't detect anything in his voice, but it was hard to tell over the phone. And he was smoother now than when I'd first met him. "You think I make this shit up to amuse you?" I said.

He imagined a frog in a pot, the water getting gradually warmer, the frog never noticing any of it. He imagined people telling themselves they would never be part of something corrupt, then telling themselves they would only be part of it to make it better, then telling themselves, hey, the thing wasn't corrupt in the first place, it was just the way of the world, they'd been naïve before and now they were savvy.

Rationalization was my narcotic. And, as with all drugs, over time, I habituated to mine. I needed more and more to accomplish less and less. Eventually, there was no dose at all that could confer the comfort I craved.

ask Bill Binney, or Thomas Drake, or Chelsea Manning, or Diane Roark, or Coleen Rowley, or Jeffrey Sterling, or Thomas Tamm, or Russell Tice, or Kirk Wiebe. And look what they'd done to John Kiriakou—for exposing torture

He glanced to his left, which for most people is a neurolinguistic sign of recall rather than of construction. Had he looked in the opposite direction, I would have read it as a lie.

If you live only for yourself, dying is an especially scary proposition.

wise physicians would stroke their chins and opine about the Brugada syndrome and the long QT syndrome, and potential abnormalities in sodium and potassium channels, and lethal arrhythmias hitting with the destructiveness and unpredictability of rogue waves, all in the same solemn tones that were once the exclusive province of monks invoking the mysteries of the will of God.

Without altering my pace or direction, I looked into the chinpira's eyes, my expression obsidian flat. I let him know with this look that I was neither afraid nor looking for trouble, that I'd done this kind of thing many times before, that if he was in search of some excitement tonight the smart thing would be to find it elsewhere.

there are qualities of devotion, and celebration, and meditation, qualities that are necessary concomitants to a life worth living. Ginza-yu

vicissitudes

at times the city can feel self-satisfied, even solipsistic

You could only remember your own mistake so as not to repeat it next time.

I read Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society, where Niebuhr talked about how the baser self has to deceive the better self to get the better self's buy-in for behavior it would never otherwise agree to.

divorce was the chemotherapy of marriage, so expensive and toxic that only couples in extremis would attempt it as a cure. And if half of marriages were so cancerous that they justified treatment with the equivalent of chemotherapy, what did that say about the others? How many of the nondivorced had just learned to live with the illness because the cure seemed even worse than the disease?

some traveler from the undiscovered country. I know as well as I know anything the dead are simply dead.

provocation.

What cops call hunches," Trahan said, "FBI hackers call pattern recognition.