The Killer Ascendant Quotes

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

“We could go from bliss and harmony to anger and recriminations as fast and with as little warning as a tropical storm. What made it bearable, what made it good, was that the foul weather would pass with equal suddenness, usually leaving something glorious in its wake.”
― Barry Eisler, The Killer Ascendant

“It’s been my experience that people who can express their political views only in clichés and passionate generalizations are fanatics.”
― Barry Eisler, The Killer Ascendant

“She wondered what it was about men that wed them more to a way of doing things than to achieving their ostensible goals.”
― Barry Eisler, The Killer Ascendant

“Most people find it hard to do two things at once, like complete a sentence and avoid a palm heel to the nose.”
― Barry Eisler, The Killer Ascendant

“You’ve looked into the abyss, and can feel it looking back still;”
― Barry Eisler, The Killer Ascendant

“If he were a philosopher king or a benevolent dictator, the only jobs he thought he might enjoy more than his current occupation, he’d have a rule that you could only authorize a war if you were actually going to go off and personally fight it. That’d get the politicians singing “Kumbaya” right quick.”
― Barry Eisler, The Killer Ascendant

“malingerer.”
― Barry Eisler, The Killer Ascendant

“perambulations”
― Barry Eisler, The Killer Ascendant

“peccadillo.”
― Barry Eisler, The Killer Ascendant

“vicissitudes”
― Barry Eisler, The Killer Ascendant

“skein”
― Barry Eisler, The Killer Ascendant

“bathysphere”
― Barry Eisler, The Killer Ascendant

“Charvet.”
― Barry Eisler, The Killer Ascendant

“Jean-Louis Murat, Patricia Kaas”
― Barry Eisler, The Killer Ascendant

“steel Jaeger-Lecoultre Reverso Grande Taille”
― Barry Eisler, The Killer Ascendant

“propitiate”
― Barry Eisler, The Killer Ascendant

“profusion”
― Barry Eisler, The Killer Ascendant

“It wasn’t how far you fell, it was how high you bounced”
― Barry Eisler, The Killer Ascendant

“Sometimes you need the anesthesia. Because what you learn about yourself when fear finally overtakes you isn’t pretty. You understand that the person you thought of as yourself, your immutable, indivisible self, is just an overlay, fragile and frail. Fear strips away the façade. And having to see what lies beneath, and accept it, makes you different from everyone who hasn’t been similarly forged. You’ve been aged; they remain neophytes. You have brutal clarity; they, comforting illusions. You’ve looked into the abyss, and can feel it looking back still; they don’t even know such a place exists. And for all of it, you hate them.”
― Barry Eisler, The Killer Ascendant

“It has everything to do with Rotterdam. America’s oil addiction is a sickness that’s killing the patient. Christ, Americans would rather send soldiers to war than carpool to work.”
― Barry Eisler, The Killer Ascendant

“After all, to worry, at a minimum you have to care.”
― Barry Eisler, The Killer Ascendant