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79897fc
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It's been my experience that people who can express their political views only in cliches and passionate generalizations are fanatics.
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Barry Eisler |
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fd8ffac
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Tatsu was true samurai, and would continue serving the same master no matter how many times that master ignored or even abused him. Devoted service was the highest end he knew. It
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Barry Eisler |
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584c9ce
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Sometimes, you have to remind yourself the perfect is the enemy of the good.
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Barry Eisler |
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51b2efc
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Had I not known that I was dead already I would have mourned my loss of life. --last words of Ota Dokan, scholar of military arts and poet, 1486
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Barry Eisler |
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761c930
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Men use these words to frighten us, Livia would tell them. To intimidate and paralyze. We need to habituate to what upsets us so we can fight through it. Deny our attackers the weapon of their words. And what was true for the verbal was true, too, for the physical.
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Barry Eisler |
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ce34aa4
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In the twenty-first century, people threw off data like dead skin cells.
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Barry Eisler |
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16cce24
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First was the fewer, not less. Now it was the care in avoiding a preposition at the end of a sentence. An educated man, presumably. Precise. Apparently fussy about small-minded rules, perhaps to compensate for a willingness to ignore large ones.
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Barry Eisler |
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3672012
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The insult was calculated. Whether this guy was an amateur or a professional, he would perceive himself as the latter, and would now be invested in proving it to me. Interrogators call the technique ego down.
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Barry Eisler |
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f12b449
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If you wanted to understand the mentality of most Washington insiders, all you had to do was put yourself in the mind of an insecure teenager, at which point it all began to make sense.
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Barry Eisler |
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fe2f0ff
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Well, the club is open until three in the morning and she works every day. So, by the time she gets home..." "I get the picture," I said. Though in fact, it was a little hard to imagine Harry with an attachment that didn't have an Ethernet cable and a mouse. He was an introverted, socially stunted guy, with no contacts I knew of outside of his day job, which he kept at arm's length in any event, and me. Conditions that had always made him u..
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Barry Eisler |
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4ba2f37
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I hadn't meant to embarrass him. "Harry, I only ask because, when you're young, you sometimes think you can have it both ways. If you're just having fun, you don't need to tell her anything. You shouldn't tell her anything. But if the attachment gets deeper, you'll need to do some hard thinking. About how close you want to get with her, about how important your hobbies are. Because you can't live with one foot in daylight and the other in s..
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Barry Eisler |
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dd19211
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War is a part of human nature, and we Japanese are human. But we have never fought, we have certainly never built weapons of mass destruction, to convince the world of the rightness of an idea. It took America and its bastard twin, communism, to do that." He"
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Barry Eisler |
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a3e793f
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we rarely see what we prefer to overlook.
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Barry Eisler |
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a1d1b4b
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Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half light; I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
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Barry Eisler |
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13db68d
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Do all the people who know me know me better than I know myself?
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Barry Eisler |
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e6f54ca
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Checking your six?" he said, still smiling. "I thought you wanted an airport because they're safe. What is it about me that scares people so much?"
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Barry Eisler |
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1af56f6
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Medicine isn't supposed to taste good--that's what candy is for. Medicine is supposed to make you better.
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Barry Eisler |
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172290e
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the young man's blindness irreparable, his mistakes immutable, the consequences irreversible.
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Barry Eisler |
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87d5b7c
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In my unfortunately infrequent encounters with real passion, I'm rarely as careful as I ought to be. The rationalization goes something like: With all the bullets and mortar rounds I've survived, I must be immune to sexually transmitted diseases. Stupid, I know. More likely, fate will indulge its taste for irony by killing me with AIDS os some other unpleasant alternative.
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humor
die-by-the-sword
personal-beliefs
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Barry Eisler |
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cda4a22
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Taliskers.
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Barry Eisler |
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a2e4aee
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The walls flickered in the candlelight. The room felt close and warm, like an underground sanctuary.
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Barry Eisler |
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11a115d
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It's a science. There are people out there who are experts at getting others to do tomorrow what was unthinkable today.
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Barry Eisler |
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0326566
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I was impressed, although unsurprised. She was obviously in the habit of thinking operationally, and was as matter-of-fact about it as she was effective. I'd already concluded she was trained. To that assessment I now added a probable minimum of several years of field experience.
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Barry Eisler |
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b178893
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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."
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Barry Eisler |
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c7fd9c8
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I headed back to Shun Tak to catch the next ferry to Macau. I tried not to think too much about what I was about to do. Charging an ambush is counterinstinctive: when your lizard brain identifies the direction the threat is coming from, it wants you to run away. But your lizard brain doesn't always know best. It tends to focus on short-term considerations, and doesn't always adequately account for the value of unpredictability, of deception..
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Barry Eisler |
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30b21bc
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I nodded my head at him and gave a small wave of acknowledgment, the gesture communicating, Oh there you are, good. I started walking over. His head turtled in a fraction and his body tensed in the internationally approved reaction to being spotted on surveillance. It's hard to describe, but it looks a little like what a gowned patient does when the doctor picks up a long instrument and advises this might be a little uncomfortable. He looke..
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Barry Eisler |
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f0842ed
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When I was about a meter away and beyond the range of his peripheral vision, I took a deep step in, dropped into a squat just behind him, and wrapped my arms tourniquet-tight around his legs just above the knees. I felt his body go rigid, heard him suck in a breath. In my adrenalized, slow-motion vision, I logged every detail: the height of the guardrail; rust marks on the metal; chewing gum ground black into the cement tiles from which his..
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Barry Eisler |
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f2fd1f6
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Two people, Chinese civilians, were heading toward me. Shit. I averted my eyes and changed my posture, dropping my shoulders, adopting a more rolling gait, giving them a persona to remember, a persona that wasn't mine. I felt them looking at me closely as I passed. They might have seen what had happened; if they had, they would be in mild denial about it and trying to come up with some other explanation for the evidence of their senses, wha..
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Barry Eisler |
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263d87a
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but the truth was, his apology meant nothing to her. In her mind, behavior was the truth, not words.
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Barry Eisler |
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d3239a8
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It might be beneficial for him occasionally to be reminded that I work for myself. That he was a stagehand, not one of the actors.
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Barry Eisler |
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5a953c6
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He laughed at that, which was good. I needed him to understand who was in charge, but didn't want to beat him down too hard. His goodwill, his naive sense of fairness, was a potential asset, and not something to toss away needlessly.
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Barry Eisler |
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43675d8
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The room was large, and largely empty. The pace would pick up later in the evening. For now, the action comprised just a few lonely souls. They seemed lost in the expanse of the room, their play joyless, desultory, as though they'd been looking for a livelier party and found themselves stuck with this one instead.
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Barry Eisler |
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988c181
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She's a bargirl. You don't know where her loyalties lie. That one was unconvincing. No one had directed her against me--I was the one who had been pursuing her. She hadn't needed to warn me about the bugs. My gut told me she wasn't dissembling.
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Barry Eisler |
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65185a1
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I spotted Delilah instantly. She was one of a handful of people quietly attending the room's lone baccarat table, and the only non-Asian in sight. She was dressed plainly, in black pants and a black, shoulderless top. Her hair was pulled back and I saw no signs of makeup or jewelry. If she'd been trying to downplay her looks, though, she hadn't been notably successful. I checked the usual hotspots and saw nothing that set off any alarms. So..
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Barry Eisler |
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a1f2d48
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At the outset of the second of these Hong Kong excursions, I noticed an Arab standing in the lobby of the Macau Mandarin Oriental as we moved through it. He was new, not one of Belghazi's bodyguards. I noted his presence and position, but of course gave no sign that he had even registered in my consciousness. He, however, was not similarly discreet. In the instant in which my gaze moved over his face, I saw he was looking at me intently, al..
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Barry Eisler |
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fc4203f
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You don't just childproof your guns," was how he put it. "You also gun-proof your child."
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Barry Eisler |
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b85c0b7
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I noted he had no place to conceal a weapon or transmitter. I wondered whether the attire had been chosen deliberately, to reassure me. Dox liked to play the hick, and a lot of people bought the act, but I knew he could be subtle when he wanted to be.
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Barry Eisler |
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34c3ebc
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But she was also uneasy. She remembered when she'd been in college and had come across the Nietzsche quote: Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.
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Barry Eisler |
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fa18fda
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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.
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Barry Eisler |
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e9901e9
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When I was ready, I eased in beside him. Immediately I felt my muscles trying to shrink back from the heat, and knew that in a moment they would give up their fruitless struggle and surrender to delirious relaxation.
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Barry Eisler |
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fb9b85f
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I told myself it was all right, I wasn't disappointed, it was better this way. I wondered in a detached way whether it was all part of some cosmic punishment for Crazy Jake, the blood brother I had killed in Vietnam. Or perhaps for the other things I've done. To be periodically tantalized by the hope of something real, something good, always knowing at the same time it was all going to turn to dust.
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Barry Eisler |
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790a4a6
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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.
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Barry Eisler |
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724e444
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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."
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Barry Eisler |
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782c730
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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."
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Barry Eisler |