Quotes from Barry Eisler

A few minutes later we pulled up in front of a nondescript office building. I paid the driver and we got out. The rain had stopped but the street was empty, almost forlorn. If I hadn't known where we were, I would have thought it an odd place to get out of a cab in the middle of the night.

He smiled. "What's going on?" "Why does something have to be going on? Maybe I just missed you." He gave me an uncharacteristically streetwise look. I had a feeling I knew where he'd picked it up. "Yeah, I missed you, too." I wasn't looking forward to the turn the conversation would take when I brought up Yukiko, and felt no hurry to get there. A waitress came by. Harry ordered a coffee and some carrot cake.

A vending machine hung tilted from the wall, advertising laundry soap at fifty yen a packet to customers who might as well have been ghosts.

I looked around as though unsure of myself, but it was really just a routine check of my surroundings. Adrenaline causes tunnel vision. Experience and a desire to survive ameliorate it. The faces around the tatami radiated amusement, not danger.

I heard laughter and looked up. Some kids at the terminal next to me, playing an online game. I wondered for a moment how I had gotten here. And I wondered if maybe this is what Tatsu had meant when he said I could never retire. That I would inevitably ruin every other possibility.

The months and days are the travelers of eternity.

Open your eyes, you idiot, I wanted to say. This woman is a shark. She's from a different world, a different species. There's something way fucking wrong here. Instead: "Harry, my gut tends to be pretty good about these things.

It has everything to do with Rotterdam. America's oil addiction is a sickness that's killing the patient. Christ, Americans would rather send soldiers to war than carpool to work.

You manage the place?" He smiled. "Something like that." Someone brought a stretcher. The dark-complected guy was gritting his teeth and whimpering. Someone admonished him, "Urusei na! Gaman shiro!" Shut up! Take the pain!

wish that I could somehow tell him what I knew now and help him for both our sakes to get it right, and a grief that such a thing was impossible, the young man's blindness irreparable, his mistakes immutable, the consequences irreversible.

Sigur Rós's Samskeyti, a song Delilah

The third floor was quieter still. For a few moments, I leaned against the railing surrounding the open center of the floor, gazing down at the band, at the patrons at the tables before the stage, and at the waiters crossing between, and felt an odd sadness descend, both remote and heavy, as though I was watching this lively scene not so much from on high but rather from an impossibly detached and alienated distance

but the truth was, his apology meant nothing to her. In her mind, behavior was the truth, not words.

steel Jaeger-Lecoultre Reverso Grande Taille

In the scope of the universe, and the arc of justice, my life is of little consequence.

Glock with an exceptionally long magazine.

Death catches everyone eventually, and I had never harbored any illusions about its ability to catch me. That it had hesitated so long to do so seemed born more of a desire to mock me than of any real inclination to wait. Death had tired of that game, and had finally moved in to collect what we all owe.

antediluvian

A friend who loves Paris once told me, 'There aren't many things we humans need to do. We need to eat, we need to drink, we need to make love. And the French attitude is, okay, we should do those things very well.

Business. I'm an accountant. Once a year I have to come to Japan for some of the firm's local clients." It was a good cover story. No one ever asks follow-up questions when you tell them you're an accountant. They're afraid you might answer.

Thirty-round mag

Well, if anybody ever compiles a list of the high-water marks of human cleverness, I'm afraid that's unlikely to merit consideration.

She had been too excited to sleep deeply—from killing Barnett, of course, but even more because of everything that was going to happen next.

interesting how much insight you could have into your own pathologies, and how little impact the insight would have on your underlying needs. Or on your behavior.