There was Asuka, birthplace of Yamato Japan, with its long-vacant burial mounds, surfaces carved with supernatural images of beasts and semi-humans, their makers and their meaning lost in the timeless...
The waiter brought the drinks. After he had moved silently away, I looked at her and said, You’re not involved in any of this? She looked into her glass. Several seconds went by. You want an honest an...
So much of being a good interrogator was just knowing how to actively listen to someone,
She nodded. At first what I thought I wanted was revenge. I kept thinking of how to hurt you, how to cause you pain, like the pain you caused me. I wasn’t surprised. And I resented you for that, she w...
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.
Open your eyes, you idiot, I wanted to say. This woman is a shark. She’s from a different world, a different species. There’s something way fucking wrong here. Instead: Harry, my gut tends to be prett...
No aru taka wa, tsume o kakusu, as the Japanese saying goes. The hawk with talent hides its talons.
Kyou nite mo kyou natsukashiya… Though in Kyoto, I long for Kyoto…
I’ve gotten used to hoping for so little that I seem to have lost any natural immunity to the emotion’s infection.
It’s been my experience that people who can express their political views only in clichés and passionate generalizations are fanatics.
Is she your first girlfriend? I asked, my tone gentle. I told you, she’s not really my girlfriend, he said, ducking the question. If she’s occupying enough of your attention to keep you in bed until t...
In the twenty-first century, people threw off data like dead skin cells.
I wondered if she had bought the story. If she hadn’t thanked Harry for his response, I would have known she hadn’t bought it, because she was classy and it wouldn’t have been like her not to respond....
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 v...
I was impressed, although unsurprised. She was obviously in the habit of thinking operationally, and was as matter-of-fact about it as she was effective. I’d already concluded she was trained. To that...
I waited a moment, then lowered myself, cross-legged, to the earth. Some of the graves were adorned with flowers, in various stages of freshness and decay. As though the dead could smell the bouquets.
I paused before the door and used the SoldierVision to confirm the hallway was clear before opening it.
He moves like a cat, hears like a dog, and hides like a rabbit. And strikes like a damn rattlesnake.
Arrington smoked
And divorce was the chemotherapy of marriage, so expensive and toxic that only couples in extremis would attempt it as a cure. And if half of marriages were so cancerous that they justified treatment...