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Book: Graveyard of Memories
Quotes of Book: Graveyard of Memories

Barry Eisler _ Graveyard of Memories
Asian face and local language skills to handle the cash. I had just returned to the States from Vietnam, having left the military under a cloud, the origins of which I was able to understand only years later. My mother, the American half of the marriage, had just died; I had no brothers or sisters;
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Barry Eisler _ Graveyard of Memories
People talk about morality. Sometimes I think there's just what you can do, and what you can't. Well, I could. And I was going to.
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Barry Eisler _ Graveyard of Memories
My mother had tried to raise me as a Catholic, but war had deracinated whatever meager plantings her efforts had achieved. No God ever would have stood silent spectator to what I saw in Vietnam. To what I did there. Either there was no God, or there was and he didn't give a damn.
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Barry Eisler _ Graveyard of Memories
Why are the most painful memories also the sweetest; why does the sweetness always draw us back no matter how long the pain might have kept us away beforehand? I don't know,
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Barry Eisler _ Graveyard of Memories
You have to remember, the history the powers-that-be feed you always excludes what they managed to bury. Or whom.
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Barry Eisler _ Graveyard of Memories
Life can only be understood backward; but it must be lived forward. -Kierkegaard
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Barry Eisler _ Graveyard of Memories
I miss her. God, I do. It's beyond missing; it's a kind of mourning. And not just for everything we had, but for everything we might have had, could have had, if only I had made other choices, if only I had been someone else, or something else. But who, or what, would that be? I try to imagine it and I can't. It feels like a delusion, a deception, a dream. All the world's a stage, isn't that what Shakespeare said? And all the men and women merely players. And so they are. So we all are. But that's poetry. The prose is simpler. Sometimes there's just what you can do. And what you can't.
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Barry Eisler _ Graveyard of Memories
I wish I'd told her I loved her. It bothers me that I didn't. I'd been so close, and then I'd held back. I tell myself it would have made no difference, and I believe that's true. But at least then she would have known.
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Barry Eisler _ Graveyard of Memories
When I'd killed Ozawa at the sentō, I'd briefly wondered whether I was now one of the bad guys. By the time I did McGraw, I'd figured out there are no bad guys, any more than there are good guys. There are only smart people, and stupid ones; puppets, and puppet masters. Better a wise rōnin, I decided, than a naïve samurai.
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Barry Eisler _ Graveyard of Memories
I was surprised at how much the genuine clothes made me feel like a monk. I would remember that-that the details mattered, not just in how you looked, but in how you felt, in the kind of unconscious vibe you emanated and that people might key on one way or the other.
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Barry Eisler _ Graveyard of Memories
I thought of an expression my father had once told me: Be good to people on your way up. You may meet them again on your way down.
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Barry Eisler _ Graveyard of Memories
What was that Churchill saying? "Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result." That's what this felt like.
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