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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“the neighborhood was quiet, its colonial houses decaying in stoic dignity beneath the swaying palm trees.”
― Barry Eisler, Inside Out

“For was it not true that when the student is ready, the teacher appears?”
― Barry Eisler, London Twist

“Preemptive”
― Barry Eisler, Fault Line

“— 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

“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

“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

“victuals,”
― Barry Eisler, The Detachment

“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’s like America,” he went on. “I mean look at us, we’re always telling ourselves how peace-loving we are. ‘We’re a peace-loving people, we love peace.’ I guess that’s why we spend more on our military than the rest of the world combined, why we have over seven hundred overseas military bases in a hundred and thirty countries, and why we’ve been at war pretty much continuously since we were just a bunch of colonies. Shoot, you think if a Martian visited Earth and tried to identify the most peace-loving culture, he’d pick the U.S. of A.?”
― Barry Eisler, Extremis

“I paused before the door and used the SoldierVision to confirm the hallway was clear before opening it.”
― Barry Eisler, Winner Take All

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

“I don’t know if I’m ready for all that,” I said. I felt like I was outside my body, as though I was listening to someone else speaking the words coming from my mouth. “Of course you’re not. No one ever is. Because there’s a responsibility that comes with the privilege.” He licked his lips. “When my little son died, there was nothing I could do to save him. All the things I would have done, would have been overjoyed to do, were meaningless. You can’t imagine the impact of knowing that the most precious thing over which you have full control—your own life—is useless as barter or bribe to save the life of your child.”
― Barry Eisler, Redemption Games

“provocation.”
― Barry Eisler, Fault Line

“ineluctably”
― Barry Eisler, The Detachment

“pluperfect”
― Barry Eisler, London Twist

“Call it assassination feng shui: the vibe was just more favorable”
― Barry Eisler, The Detachment

“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

“After the adrenaline rush of combat, there’s a powerful parasympathetic backlash, and the body craves rest so badly that you can fall into a kind of stupor. That’s why Napoleon knew the best time to counterattack was immediately after the battle, when the other side was still drugged with victory.”
― Barry Eisler, Extremis

“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