Quotes from Barry Eisler

in my experience, one of the guiding principles of human relations is "what have you done for me lately"—but it was something, a small antidote against the potential poison of his professional affiliations.

know. I get it. Because when I knew but they didn't know I knew, that was good. But when they knew that I knew but I didn't know they knew, that was bad. But now that I know they know that I know, and they don't know it, it's good again.

Arrington smoked

Seriously protecting yourself calls for the annihilation of ties with society, ties that most people need the way they need oxygen. You give up friends, family, romance. You walk through the world like a ghost, detached from the living around you. If you were to die in, say, a bus accident, you'd wind up buried in an obscure municipal graveyard, just another John Doe, no flowers, no mourners, hell, no mourning. It's natural, probably even desirable, to be afraid of all this.

He exchanged a few words with Washio, who looked around and then pointed at me. I had the sudden sense that this was more attention from Murakami than I really wanted. I watched him nudge his two men. The three of them started moving toward me. Adrenaline dumped into my veins. I felt the surge. I looked around casually, searching for a weapon of convenience. There was nothing handy. They walked up and stood in front of me, three abreast, Murakami slightly in front of the other two.

because how could something so awful also contain something so impossibly good?

would show that inside twenty-one feet against a knife, trying to get a gun out is typically a losing bet, especially if you're backing straight up rather than getting off the line.

The way she had offered to try to help Harry, who had been not just an asset of mine, but a rare friend, an offer that had been as sincere as it was ultimately useless.

I made my circuitous way to the hotel and checked in.

And 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?

Defender Ultra

Citadel Knives.

A turtle doesn't get up on a bookshelf by itself

People put out signals—body language, gait, clothes, facial expression, posture, attitude, speech, mannerisms—that can tell you where they're from, what they do, who they are. Most importantly, do they fit in.

A survivor reassesses odds continually and doesn't disrespect them.

Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity

suffering in the midst of the vast city from solitude so acute that not even the narcotic of late-night television talk shows could distract them from occasional nocturnal forays in search of signs of other life; even other furita, on their way back to their parents' houses, which, to make their meager ends meet, they still inhabited, who might share a tired cigarette and an unfunny joke before sleeping off the morning, then rising to do it all over again later that day.

It was a long time ago." "I don't think something like that can ever be a long time ago. It's not how time works.

contravention

After about fifteen minutes he walked over to me. "Randori?" he asked, in a tone that was more a challenge than an invitation. I nodded, averting my eyes from his hard stare. In my mind, our contest was already underway, and I prefer my opponents to underestimate me.

Immediately the sounds of the street below grew detached, distant, the meaningless echoes of urban voices whose urgent notes reached but held no sway over the park-like necropolis within. From where I stood, the cemetery seemed to have no end. It stretched out before me, a city in its own right, its myriad markers windowless tenements in miniature, laid out in still symmetry, long boulevards of the dead.

Sacrifice was the duty only of the few, who were of course hypocritically lauded by the many, the latter barely pausing in their infantile partying to wish the soldiers good luck at war.

Afterglow. Gin, absinthe, Amaro, ginger, lemon, orange, and nutmeg.

The owner of a coffee shop sat diminished in the back of his deserted establishment, waiting for patronage that had long since vanished.