Barry Eisler > Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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’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

“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

“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

“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

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.”
― Barry Eisler, The Night Trade

“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

“Something about all that power seemed to make the assholes who wielded it believe they were invulnerable.”
― Barry Eisler, The God's Eye View

“I have no patience for anyone who enjoys meat but moans about slaughterhouses, who wears cheap clothes but deplores sweatshops, who weeps about climate change from behind the wheel of an SUV or from the window seat of an airplane.”
― Barry Eisler, The God's Eye View

“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

“Your personality. You know, 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.” He looked at his soup, then back to her. “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

“You forget the things you want to remember and remember the things you want to forget.”
― Barry Eisler, The Killer Ascendant

“The person who returns from living abroad isn't the same person who left originally... Your outlook changes. You don't take things for granted that you used to. For instance, I noticed in New York that when one cab cut off another, the driver who got cut off would always yell at the other driver... and I realized this was because Americans assume that the other person intended to do what he did, so they want to teach the person a lesson. But you know, in Japan, people almost never get upset in those situations. Japanese look at other people's mistakes more as something arbitrary, like the weather, I think, not so much as something to get angry about.”
― Barry Eisler, Rain Fall

“In the twenty-first century, people threw off data like dead skin cells.”
― Barry Eisler, The God's Eye View

“no matter the pain or shock or confusion, never stop moving. Never give them a stationary target.”
― Barry Eisler, Inside Out

“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.”
― Barry Eisler, The Killer Collective

“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

“— E acabei por ir a casa dela para lhe configurar o sistema todo.

— Harry, «configuraste-lhe o sistema todo»? — perguntei, arregalando

os olhos e fingindo-me pasmado.

Baixou o olhar, mas não conseguiu esconder um sorriso.

— Tu percebeste.

— Não vais... penetrar as seguranças dela, pois não? — perguntei, incapaz

de resistir.”
― Barry Eisler, A Lonely Resurrection

“There were a lot of variations, but social engineering always came down to giving the person something to hope for, something to believe in. The impression that what was happening was just a transaction, a kind of contract with an acceptable price and a reasonable expectation of performance by the other party. Sure, the other party was offering terms at gunpoint, but under stress most people clung to their everyday beliefs, including the belief that their fellow humans could generally be counted on to carry out promises.”
― Barry Eisler, All the Devils

“The essence of samurai is not just service, but loyalty to his master, to a cause greater than himself.”
― Barry Eisler, A Clean Kill in Tokyo

“He stood for a moment, taking it all in, marveling that people thought hillbillies like him were the ones with the bad taste.”
― Barry Eisler, The Night Trade