Top 100 Lee Child Quotes
#1. you know much about head injuries?'
'only the ones I cause
Lee Child
#2. We investigate, we prepare, we execute. We find them, we take them down, and then we piss on their ancestors' graves.
Lee Child
#3. The Reacher brothers' need for caffeine makes heroin addiction look like an amusing little take-it-or-leave-it sideline.
Lee Child
#4. Male authors always take care to make their heroes at least one inch taller than they are, and considerably more muscular. Just as female authors give their heroines better hair and slimmer thighs.
Lee Child
#5. Printing currency for foreigners to buy is the best racket a government can get into.
Lee Child
#6. second rule, learned from a lifetime of bad luck and trouble: Maintain a little dignity.
Lee Child
#7. I had a brief theater background and loved the backstage world there's more backstage work in television, so I saw a job advertised and applied, and got it. That was back in 1977, when getting jobs was easy.
Lee Child
#8. problem shared is a problem halved.
Lee Child
#9. First you spend a lot of time and money making the grass grow, just so you can spend a lot of time and money cutting it down again a little while later.
Lee Child
#10. Some old guy once said that the meaning of life is that it ends.
Lee Child
#11. Reacher said, "Our nearest tanks are a thousand miles from Yemen or Afghanistan, and they take weeks and weeks and thousands of people to move. It would be easier to bring Yemen or Afghanistan to them. Also faster and less obtrusive.
Lee Child
#12. Shrago stayed on his feet for a long second, and then his knees got the message that the lights were out upstairs, and he went down in a vertical heap, like he had jumped off a wall.
Lee Child
#13. I thought justice ground real slow in Texas." "Only if you plead not guilty.
Lee Child
#14. Life is endlessly capable of surprises, so he knew one day he would come face to face with his physical equal. With somebody who might worry him. But he looked and saw this wasn't the day. So he just smiled and looked away again.
Lee Child
#15. Nothing ever works like you predict it. All plans fall apart as soon as the first shot is fired.
Lee Child
#16. Aim for the side of the skull, which is softer and displaces the brain more.
Lee Child
#17. We know we need civilization and laws and procedures, but isn't it frustrating? Wouldn't it be great if we could just do what we needed to do?
Lee Child
#18. We're your legal advisors.'
Which they weren't, obviously. Reacher knew that. Army lawyers don't travel in pairs and breathe through their mouths.
Lee Child
#19. It's a tough case and the first time Reacher needs to recruit somebody to help him out. He uses a woman he knew in the army she's a fascinating character.
Lee Child
#20. Second conclusion: If you can see a bandwagon, it's too late to get on. I think the person who said that to me
Lee Child
#21. I was in the machine. My whole life. Then the machine coughed and spat me out. So I thought, OK, if I'm out, I'm out. All the way out. I was a little angry and it was probably an immature reaction. But I got used to it.
Lee Child
#22. Thomas Brant watched them go. He used his cell phone and called his boss, a man named Curtis Mauney.
Lee Child
#23. So Carbone had no closet full of clean and pressed uniforms. There were no serried ranks of undershirts, crisp and laundered, folded ready for use. There were no gleaming boots under his bed.
Lee Child
#24. I had to decide how to use that pressure. I had to decide whether it was going to crush me or turn me into a diamond.
Lee Child
#25. Socratic, they call it in college. All kinds of back and forth, designed to elicit truths implicitly known by all rational beings.
Lee Child
#26. If you can't acquaint an opponent with reason, you must acquaint his head with the sidewalk.
Lee Child
#27. Griezman said, "Not literally, of course. He's obsessed about certain things, that's all. No doubt rooted in racist and xenophobic pathologies, and worsened by irrational fears. But otherwise he's quite normal.
Lee Child
#28. Fence as far as the missing panel. Then he started to run toward it. Then he died. I swung the sap and hit him. But he didn't go
Lee Child
#29. I don't need validation, recognition or praise. What I need are facts and the facts are that one of my books gets sold, somewhere in the world, every second.
Lee Child
#30. Full of thrills and tension - but smart and human too.
Lee Child
#31. Handguns were in-room weapons. Under expert control in high-pressure situations the average range for a successful engagement was about eleven feet.
Lee Child
#32. Never forgive, never forget. Do it once and do it right. You reap what you sow. Plans go to hell as soon as the first shot is fired. Protect and serve. Never off duty.
Lee Child
#33. You see something scary, you should stand up and step toward it, not away from it. Instinctively, reflexively, in a raging fury.
Lee Child
#34. He had crashed through the barrier. He had stopped worrying and started relaxing. He was up on that plateau where you just did whatever needed doing. I knew that place. I lived there.
Lee Child
#35. Law and order are everywhere the law and order which protect the established hierarchy.
Lee Child
#36. OK," Reacher said. "It wasn't a colonel. It was a one-star general.
Lee Child
#37. I do a little fact checking now and then. Other than that its impact is simply that email has revolutionized communication for me, and my website has built up a community of readers, which is a lot of fun.
Lee Child
#38. Plan A is to hitch a ride out of here. But if they want a war, then plan B is to win it.
Lee Child
#39. An average infantryman records one enemy fatality for every fifteen thousand combat rounds expended.
Lee Child
#40. I fed the phone again and dialed the Chief of Staff's office, deep inside the Pentagon. A woman's voice answered. It was a perfect Washington voice. Not high, not low, cultured, elegant, nearly accentless.
Lee Child
#41. The only opponents Reacher truly feared were small whippy guys with fast hands and sharp blades.
Lee Child
#42. I wish he'd rushed out." "Always a sound policy." "I bet you never did." "More times than I can count. Which is why I'm still here, having dinner with you. The chaotic universe. Darwinism in action.
Lee Child
#43. We're going to beat you so hard your kids will be born dizzy.
Lee Child
#44. Don't get it right - get it WRITTEN!
Lee Child
#45. I'm opposed to censorship of any kind, especially by government. But it's plain common sense that producers should target their product with some kind of sensitivity.
Lee Child
#46. Reacher said, "What have we missed ?"
Ratcliffe said, "A piece of the puzzle. What do you know about computers ?"
"I saw one once.
Lee Child
#47. ammunition boxes. They were both packed tight with cartridges standing on their firing pins, points upward.
Lee Child
#48. I worked thirteen years, got me nowhere. I feel like I tried it their way, and to hell with them. Now I'm going to try it my way.
Lee Child
#49. Chang asked, "Was that the showbusiness answer?" Reacher
Lee Child
#50. Either way Reacher figured he might as well find out. He had no place to go, and all the time in the world to get there, so detours cost him nothing.
Lee Child
#51. Nothing of value was ever achieved in the morning.
Lee Child
#52. Lowell's an odd duck," Peterson said. "He's a loner. He reads books.
Lee Child
#53. An unprovoked head butt is like bringing a sawed-off shotgun to a knife fight.
Lee Child
#54. I took my right hand off the wheel and reverse-punched him square between the eyes. It was a good solid smack. It put him right back to sleep. Manual anesthetic. He stayed out all the way back to the post.
Lee Child
#56. The thriller is not a recent invention. It probably goes back to the dawn of storytelling.
Lee Child
#57. K-turned across the width of Janet Salter's street. The
Lee Child
#58. [Reacher] knew people with houses. He had talked to them, with the same kind of detached interest he would talk to a person who kept snakes as pets or entered ballroom dancing competitions.
Lee Child
#59. It's always fifty-fifty, Pete. Like tossing a coin. Either I'm wrong, or I'm right, either you bring us back, or you don't, either Deputy Chiefs are what they say they are, or they're not. Always fifty-fifty. One thing or the other is always true.
Lee Child
#60. You're a hard man, Reacher," she said. He was quiet in turn. "I think I'm a realistic man," he said. "And a decent enough guy, all told." "You may find normal people don't agree." He nodded. "A lot of you don't," he said.
Lee Child
#63. I have three desks. One empty for paperwork, one for the internet and email, and one for the writing computer.
Lee Child
#64. I checked my appearance, to make sure I was fit for public consumption.
Lee Child
#65. The sign at the door was written with a backward R, to make it look Russian, which caused a minor echo of panic. Was it a reference to Merchenko? No, surely Westwood knew the difference between Russia and Ukraine. But were there Ukrainian-themed bars, for a pedantic tormentor?
Lee Child
#66. hit them fast, hit them hard, and hit them a lot
Lee Child
#67. What's the best place to hide a car? In an airport long-term lot. Like where's the best place to hide a grain of sand? On the beach
Lee Child
#68. A handgun at two hundred feet is the same thing as crossing your fingers and making a wish.
Lee Child
#69. Hope for the best, plan for the worst.
Lee Child
#70. It's a kind of zen question: if you write a book and no one reads it, is it really a book?
Lee Child
#71. The officers shook hands, and the sniper gave a millimetric nod, which Reacher returned, equally briefly, which for two alleged snipers was effusive, and for a dogface and a jarhead meeting for the first time was practically like rolling around on the floor in an ecstatic bear hug.
Lee Child
#72. Both were military. That was clear.Reacher could tell by their haircuts. No civilian barber would be as pragmatic or as brutal.
Lee Child
#73. Tony Swan, Jorge Sanchez, Calvin Franz, Frances Neagley, Stanley Lowrey, Manuel Orozco, David O'Donnell, and Karla Dixon.
Lee Child
#74. This gentleman is heading for Mineral County in West Virginia. Near a place called Keyser, not too far from the Maryland line." Which all meant nothing to Reacher, except that West Virginia sounded one step better than regular Virginia.
Lee Child
#75. In search of a pay phone. He found a phone inside the bus depot. He dialed his bank's number from memory. Nine-forty in the West, twelve-forty in the East. Lunch time in Virginia, but someone should be there.
Lee Child
#76. War isn't about dying for your country. It's about making the enemy die for his. Gen. George S. Patton
Lee Child
#77. Canada's army is three men and a dog. They probably keep their stuff forever.
Lee Child
#78. The guy said, "We don't know if the somebody is a Chinaman. That information would have helped, I guess.
Lee Child
#79. She spoke slowly and breathlessly but she was smiling a happy smile. We stepped up and hugged her. She felt cold and frail and insubstantial. She felt like she weighed less than her aluminum walker.
Lee Child
#80. They're coming at it through the name. The big guy is all over town, asking questions." He got a long plastic crackle in exchange, calm, mellifluous, and reassuring. He said, "OK, sure," but he didn't sound sure, and then he hung up the phone.
Lee Child
#81. The shorter the time, the cooler you have got to be. If you've got only one shot, you've got to make it count. You can't afford to miss because you screwed up the planning.
Lee Child
#82. All of us write wish fulfillment.
Lee Child
#83. People don't look for complications. You hear hoofbeats, you look for horses, not zebras.
Lee Child
#84. Hopeless is hopeless, and don't ever pretend it ain't
Lee Child
#85. You could have been killed." Reacher nodded. "Many times," he said. "But all long ago. Not today. Not by these guys." "You're crazy." "Or competent.
Lee Child
#86. Some kind of internecine conflict, over the spoils.
Lee Child
#87. It's always sad if anybody you know has a personal problem.
Lee Child
#88. The first day of the rest of my life.
Lee Child
#89. A lesson learned long ago: the human brain was much more sensitive to side-to-side displacement than front-to-back. An evolutionary quirk, presumably, like most things.
Lee Child
#90. I felt like someone else. I felt like a normal person. But I got over it.
Lee Child
#91. Dealing with morons ... is like teaching Hindu to a beagle.
Lee Child
#92. Most actors are small, anyway - at least compared to me.
Lee Child
#93. ... He also said, if you can't acquaint an opponent with tease, you must acquaint his head with the sidewalk. He was a man of sound instincts.
Lee Child
#94. agent. My testimony would have been automatically suspect, even years later. I would have been a defense counsel's wet dream. As in, Special Agent, please tell us about the bribe you can't prove you didn't take. So I would have joined
Lee Child
#95. I liked him fine. I like everyone. I'm a happy, cheerful, and gregarious person." "No, you're really not.
Lee Child
#96. You do not mess with the special investigators.
Lee Child
#97. Reacher prowled the hallway, his gun stiff-armed way out in front of him, his torso jerking violently left and right from the hips, like a crazy disco dance. The house-storming shuffle.
Lee Child
#98. The most sustained feat of imagination in mystery fiction today.
Lee Child
#99. For men, as they get bogged down with responsibilities, commitments, bureaucracy, it is a fantasy just to think of shedding everything literally, walking away with nothing at all, and just hitting the road.
Lee Child
#100. We should get a cup of coffee."
Chang said, "I don't understand how you drink so much coffee."
"Law of gravity," Reacher said. "If you tip it up, it comes right out. You can't help but drink it."
"Your heart must be thumping all the time."
"Better than the alternative.
Lee Child
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