The Detachment Quotes

“naïve. The triumph of hope over experience.”
― Barry Eisler, The Detachment

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

“Hot damn, look at him go! I am proud, proud to know that our great nation is being steered by men of such exceptional energy and passion. Not to mention rectitude.”
― Barry Eisler, The Detachment

“Sun Tsu: When strong, feign weakness. When weak, feign strength.”
― Barry Eisler, The Detachment

“We are studying sensible ways to amend our own constitution in India. And we often joke that perhaps you Americans could lend us yours, because you seem no longer to be using it yourselves.”
― Barry Eisler, The Detachment

“wise physicians would stroke their chins and opine about the Brugada syndrome and the long QT syndrome, and potential abnormalities in sodium and potassium channels, and lethal arrhythmias hitting with the destructiveness and unpredictability of rogue waves, all in the same solemn tones that were once the exclusive province of monks invoking the mysteries of the will of God.”
― Barry Eisler, The Detachment

“ineluctably”
― Barry Eisler, The Detachment

“perfidy”
― Barry Eisler, The Detachment

“familiar with. “HK MK23 SOCOM, Knights Armament suppressor. One each.”
― Barry Eisler, The Detachment

“Knight’s Armament SR-25, integral suppressor, twenty-round magazine, and oooh, the Leupold Mark 4 HAMR. Haven’t played with one of these before. Gonna”
― Barry Eisler, The Detachment

“insensate”
― Barry Eisler, The Detachment

“parsimony”
― Barry Eisler, The Detachment

“victuals,”
― Barry Eisler, The Detachment

“torpor,”
― Barry Eisler, The Detachment

“Rationalization was my narcotic. And, as with all drugs, over time, I habituated to mine. I needed more and more to accomplish less and less. Eventually, there was no dose at all that could confer the comfort I craved.”
― Barry Eisler, The Detachment

“Maybe democracies, maybe all cultures, had life cycles, the same as the humans who comprised them. And maybe there were things cultures could do to extend their lives—the equivalent of exercise and eating right, or, to analogize to what Horton had done, the equivalent of radical surgery—but those things would, in the end, matter only at the margins. Maybe, regardless of the efforts of the exceptional few, the genes hidden and inherent in a culture’s own DNA would dictate a length of years, and make inevitable the onset of sclerosis, and senility, and death, as ineluctably as the Fates cutting the thread of an individual life.”
― Barry Eisler, The Detachment

“No aru taka wa, tsume o kakusu, as the Japanese saying goes. The hawk with talent hides its talons.”
― Barry Eisler, The Detachment

“I didn’t know what I wanted. I trained at the Kodokan and reflected at quiet shrines and enjoyed my jazz clubs and coffee houses and whisky bars. I took long, nocturnal walks through the damascene city, and considered what I’d been part of, and what I’d almost caused. I wondered about my son and I missed Delilah. I thought about Horton. I made no decisions. I”
― Barry Eisler, The Detachment

“covering for someone coming in from”
― Barry Eisler, The Detachment

“The hawk with talent hides its talons.”
― Barry Eisler, The Detachment