“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.”
―
Barry Eisler
“I wandered the earth a mercenary, daring the gods to kill me but surviving because part of me was already dead.” ― Barry Eisler, A Clean Kill in Tokyo
“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.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.” ― Barry Eisler, Livia Lone
“Some people just need killing.” ― Barry Eisler, The Night Trade
“...savoring the sense of loneliness and freedom that comes only from solitary sojourns in strange lands...” ― Barry Eisler
“I thought of an old poker players’ expression: If you look around the table and can’t spot the sucker, the sucker is you.” ― Barry Eisler, A Lonely Resurrection
“It's a strange thing, having a child," he said. It completely alters your most fundamental priorities. When my eldest daughter was born, I realized that I would do anything - anything - to protect her. If I had to set myself on fire to save her from something, I would do it with the utmost relief and gratitude. It's quite a thing, quite a privilege, to care about someone so much that the measure of worth of your own life is changed so much."Tatsu.” ― Barry Eisler, Redemption Games
“She remembered something her mother had told her when she was a teenager: “The boy you date is different from the boy you’re engaged to, the boy you’re engaged to is different from the man you marry, the man you marry is different from the father of your children.” She might have added, “And your ex-husband is going to be different than all of them, too.” ― Barry Eisler, The God's Eye View
“It’s funny to consider how important things like that felt to me then. Proving people wrong. Fighting stupidity. Wanting formal recognition. It took me a long time to learn that proving people wrong is purposeless, fighting stupidity is futile, and formal recognition prevents people from underestimating you—and thereby from ceding to you surprise and other tactical advantages.” ― Barry Eisler, Graveyard of Memories
“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 or self-destructive.” ― Barry Eisler, Extremis
“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.” ― Barry Eisler, The Night Trade
“People have rituals for communing with the dead, rituals that depend more on the idiosyncrasies of the individual than on the influence of culture. Some visit gravesites. Some talk to portraits, or mantelpiece urns. Some go to spots favored by the deceased during life, or mouth silent prayers in houses of worship, or have trees planted in memory in some far-off land. The common denominator, of course, is a sense beyond logic that the dead are aware of all this, that they can hear the prayers and witness the deeds and feel the ongoing love and longing. People seem to find that sense comforting. I don’t believe any of it. I’ve never seen a soul depart from a body. I’ve never been haunted by a ghost, angry or loving. I’ve never been rewarded or punished or touched by some traveler from the undiscovered country. I know as well as I know anything the dead are simply dead.” ― Barry Eisler, A Lonely Resurrection
“In my unpleasant experience, unarmed against a knife, you’ve basically got four options. Your best bet is to run like hell, if you can. Next best is to do something immediately that prevents the attack from getting started. Third is to create distance so you can deploy a longer-range weapon. Fourth is to go berserk and hope not to get fatally cut going through and over your attacker. I don’t care how much training you’ve had, these are your only realistic options, and none of them is particularly good except maybe the first. Unarmed techniques against the knife are a crapshoot, and against a determined attacker with a live blade, they offer piss-poor odds.” ― Barry Eisler, A Lonely Resurrection
“Prepping people to believe something was the hard part. Once the framework was established, they became eager to fill in the details themselves, and could be counted on to do so even if those details made little sense. Remar” ― Barry Eisler, The God's Eye View
“A monk awoke from a dream that he was a butterfly, then wondered whether he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man.” ― Barry Eisler, A Clean Kill in Tokyo
“It took me a long time to learn that proving people wrong is purposeless, fighting stupidity is futile, and formal recognition prevents people from underestimating you—and thereby from ceding to you surprise and other tactical advantages.” ― Barry Eisler, Graveyard of Memories
“I didn’t say, “I’ll call you.” I didn’t hug her because of the wet clothes. Just a quick kiss. Then I turned and left. I made my way quietly down the hallway to the stairwell. I could tell she thought she wasn’t going to see me again. I had to admit she might be right. The knowledge was as damp and dispiriting as my sodden clothes. I came to the first floor and looked out at the entranceway of the building. For a second I pictured the way she had hugged me here. It already seemed like a long time ago. I felt an unpleasant mixture of gratitude and longing, streaked with guilt and regret. And in a flash of insight, cutting with cold clarity through the fog of my fatigue, I realized what I hadn’t been able to articulate earlier, not even to myself, when she’d asked me what I was afraid of. It had been this, the moment after, when I would come face to face with knowing that it would all end badly, if not this morning, then the next one. Or the one after that.” ― Barry Eisler, A Lonely Resurrection
“If I have to err, it’s on the side of assuming the worst. This way, if I’m wrong, I can always apologize. Or send flowers. You err on the other side, the flowers will be coming to you.” ― Barry Eisler, A Lonely Resurrection
“But it’s like swimming underwater, you know? At first you feel as though you could go along forever, seeing everything from this new perspective, but eventually you have to come up for air.” ― Barry Eisler, A Clean Kill in Tokyo
“I wandered the earth a mercenary, daring the gods to kill me but surviving because part of me was already dead.” ― Barry Eisler, A Clean Kill in Tokyo
“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.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.” ― Barry Eisler, Livia Lone
“Some people just need killing.” ― Barry Eisler, The Night Trade
“...savoring the sense of loneliness and freedom that comes only from solitary sojourns in strange lands...” ― Barry Eisler
“I thought of an old poker players’ expression: If you look around the table and can’t spot the sucker, the sucker is you.” ― Barry Eisler, A Lonely Resurrection
“It's a strange thing, having a child," he said. It completely alters your most fundamental priorities. When my eldest daughter was born, I realized that I would do anything - anything - to protect her. If I had to set myself on fire to save her from something, I would do it with the utmost relief and gratitude. It's quite a thing, quite a privilege, to care about someone so much that the measure of worth of your own life is changed so much."Tatsu.” ― Barry Eisler, Redemption Games
“She remembered something her mother had told her when she was a teenager: “The boy you date is different from the boy you’re engaged to, the boy you’re engaged to is different from the man you marry, the man you marry is different from the father of your children.” She might have added, “And your ex-husband is going to be different than all of them, too.” ― Barry Eisler, The God's Eye View
“It’s funny to consider how important things like that felt to me then. Proving people wrong. Fighting stupidity. Wanting formal recognition. It took me a long time to learn that proving people wrong is purposeless, fighting stupidity is futile, and formal recognition prevents people from underestimating you—and thereby from ceding to you surprise and other tactical advantages.” ― Barry Eisler, Graveyard of Memories
“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 or self-destructive.” ― Barry Eisler, Extremis
“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.” ― Barry Eisler, The Night Trade
“People have rituals for communing with the dead, rituals that depend more on the idiosyncrasies of the individual than on the influence of culture. Some visit gravesites. Some talk to portraits, or mantelpiece urns. Some go to spots favored by the deceased during life, or mouth silent prayers in houses of worship, or have trees planted in memory in some far-off land. The common denominator, of course, is a sense beyond logic that the dead are aware of all this, that they can hear the prayers and witness the deeds and feel the ongoing love and longing. People seem to find that sense comforting. I don’t believe any of it. I’ve never seen a soul depart from a body. I’ve never been haunted by a ghost, angry or loving. I’ve never been rewarded or punished or touched by some traveler from the undiscovered country. I know as well as I know anything the dead are simply dead.” ― Barry Eisler, A Lonely Resurrection
“In my unpleasant experience, unarmed against a knife, you’ve basically got four options. Your best bet is to run like hell, if you can. Next best is to do something immediately that prevents the attack from getting started. Third is to create distance so you can deploy a longer-range weapon. Fourth is to go berserk and hope not to get fatally cut going through and over your attacker. I don’t care how much training you’ve had, these are your only realistic options, and none of them is particularly good except maybe the first. Unarmed techniques against the knife are a crapshoot, and against a determined attacker with a live blade, they offer piss-poor odds.” ― Barry Eisler, A Lonely Resurrection
“Prepping people to believe something was the hard part. Once the framework was established, they became eager to fill in the details themselves, and could be counted on to do so even if those details made little sense. Remar” ― Barry Eisler, The God's Eye View
“A monk awoke from a dream that he was a butterfly, then wondered whether he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man.” ― Barry Eisler, A Clean Kill in Tokyo
“It took me a long time to learn that proving people wrong is purposeless, fighting stupidity is futile, and formal recognition prevents people from underestimating you—and thereby from ceding to you surprise and other tactical advantages.” ― Barry Eisler, Graveyard of Memories
“I didn’t say, “I’ll call you.” I didn’t hug her because of the wet clothes. Just a quick kiss. Then I turned and left. I made my way quietly down the hallway to the stairwell. I could tell she thought she wasn’t going to see me again. I had to admit she might be right. The knowledge was as damp and dispiriting as my sodden clothes. I came to the first floor and looked out at the entranceway of the building. For a second I pictured the way she had hugged me here. It already seemed like a long time ago. I felt an unpleasant mixture of gratitude and longing, streaked with guilt and regret. And in a flash of insight, cutting with cold clarity through the fog of my fatigue, I realized what I hadn’t been able to articulate earlier, not even to myself, when she’d asked me what I was afraid of. It had been this, the moment after, when I would come face to face with knowing that it would all end badly, if not this morning, then the next one. Or the one after that.” ― Barry Eisler, A Lonely Resurrection
“If I have to err, it’s on the side of assuming the worst. This way, if I’m wrong, I can always apologize. Or send flowers. You err on the other side, the flowers will be coming to you.” ― Barry Eisler, A Lonely Resurrection
“But it’s like swimming underwater, you know? At first you feel as though you could go along forever, seeing everything from this new perspective, but eventually you have to come up for air.” ― Barry Eisler, A Clean Kill in Tokyo
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