Top 350 Lee Child Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “I know I’m smarter than an armadillo.”

— Lee Child

102. “There are weird names all over the country. Why single out Mother’s Rest, in a nation with towns called Why and Whynot, and Accident and Peculiar, and Santa Claus and No Name, and Boring and Cheesequake, and Truth or Consequences, and Monkeys Eyebrow, and Okay and Ordinary, and Pie Town and Toad Suck and Sweet Lips?”

— Lee Child

103. “Realitatile sunt musafiri nepoftiti in lumea fanteziei.”

— Lee Child

104. “We’re all atheists. You don’t believe in Zeus or Thor or Neptune or Augustus Caesar or Mars or Venus or Sun Ra. You reject a thousand gods. Why should it bother you if someone else rejects a thousand and one?”

— Lee Child

105. “If in doubt, say nothing.”

— Lee Child

106. “But we’re all still KGB really. Old wine, new bottles.”

— Lee Child

107. “Delta is full of guys who can stay awake for a week and walk a hundred miles and shoot the balls off a tsetse fly, but it’s relatively empty of guys who can do all that and then tell you the difference between a Shiite and a trip to the latrine.”

— Lee Child

108. “I know,” I said. “You already don’t respect me because you saw me naked.”

— Lee Child

109. “He said all that needs to happen for evil to prevail is that good men do nothing.”

— Lee Child

110. “Although he had read that Pittsburgh was becoming an in-demand moviemaking town.”

— Lee Child

111. “Human motivation is very complex. Most people don’t really know why they do things.”

— Lee Child

112. “They taught me that inhibitions would kill me. Hit early, hit hard. Kill with the first blow. Get your retaliation in first. Cheat. The gentlemen who behaved decently weren’t there to train anybody. They were already dead.”

— Lee Child

113. “He spoke in a neutral tone and said, “Help you?” Which in my experience are two words that can precede anything from genuine wholehearted cooperation to a bullet in the face. I said, “We’re looking for John Kott.”

— Lee Child

114. “My country, right or wrong. Which means nothing, unless you admit your country is wrong sometimes. Loving a country that was right all the time would be common sense, not patriotism.”

— Lee Child

115. “We’re going to beat you so hard your kids will be born dizzy.”

— Lee Child

116. “He liked the electric darkness and the hot dirty air and the blasts of noise and traffic and the manic barking sirens and the crush of people. It helped a lonely man feel connected and isolated both at the same time.”

— Lee Child

117. “Jack Reacher ordered espresso, double, no peel, no cube, foam cup, no china, and before it arrived at his table he saw a man’s life change forever.”

— Lee Child

118. “The smart money brings a gun to a knife fight. Reacher brought a hydrogen bomb.”

— Lee Child

119. “She’s a reflection of my fascination with the diversity of America she’s totally normal in New York, but a freak in Texas. There are dozens of such clashes in America.”

— Lee Child

120. “I’m twenty-nine, yes really, I’m from Aspen, Colorado, I’m six feet one, yes really, I’ve been at Quantico two years, yes I date guys, no I dress like this just because I like it, no I’m not married, no I don’t currently have a boyfriend, and no I don’t want to have dinner with you tonight.”

— Lee Child

121. “Why aren’t you working?” Finlay asked. I shrugged. Tried to explain. “Because I don’t want to work,” I said. “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

122. “Try to look unimportant. They may be low on ammo.”

— Lee Child

123. “Psychologists figured that the memory center was located in the left brain, and the imagination engine in the right brain. Therefore people unconsciously glanced to the left when they were remembering things, and to the right when they were making stuff up. When.”

— Lee Child

124. “Michelle,” she said. “Or Shell, sometimes, for short. Which I quite like. It’s a nice diminutive. Except not with my last name. Shell Chang sounds somewhere between a Korean porn star and an oil exploration company in the South China Sea and a roll of quarters being dumped in a cash register.”

— Lee Child

125. “His shoes were bench-made by a company called Cheaney, from Northampton in England. Smarter buys than Church’s, which were basically the same shoes but with a premium tag for the name. The style Reacher had chosen was called Tenterden, which was a brown semi-brogue made of heavy pebbled leather.”

— Lee Child

126. “I thought justice ground real slow in Texas.” “Only if you plead not guilty.”

— Lee Child

127. “A soldier knows that a satisfactory observation point provides an unobstructed view to the front and adequate security to the flanks and the rear. He knows it provides protection from the elements and concealment of the observers. He knows it offers a reasonable likelihood of undisturbed occupation for the full duration of the operation.”

— Lee Child

128. “The Zip Code is about the size of Chicago. With five people. But hey, welcome to Wyoming.”

— Lee Child

129. “Foreign, for sure. But we all bleed the same color red. No doubt about that. The truth of that statement was plain to see. Reacher put the guy out of misery. A single shot, close range, behind the ear. An unnecessary round expended, but good manners had a price.”

— Lee Child

130. “We drove under a giant gray wing and headed out over open blacktop straight for a small white airplane standing alone. A corporate thing. A business jet. A Lear, or a Gulfstream, or whatever rich people buy these days. The paint winked in the sun. There was no writing on it, apart from a tail number. No name, no logo. Just white paint. Its engines were turning slowly, and its stairs were down.”

— Lee Child

131. “Joe was probably the only other human on the planet who liked coffee as much as I did. He started drinking it when he was six. I copied him immediately. I was four. Neither of us has stopped since. The Reacher brothers’ need for caffeine makes heroin addiction look like an amusing little take-it-or-leave-it sideline.”

— Lee Child

132. “Being ex-military is like being a lapsed Catholic. Even though they’re way in the back of your mind, the old rituals still exert a powerful pull.”

— Lee Child

133. “Don’t let ego get in the way of a good decision.” “You just trashed every general in our nation’s history.”

— Lee Child

134. “Never hit a woman unless she’s trying to kill you.”

— Lee Child

135. “Reacher fired. Single shot. Range, eighty feet. Nine-millimeter Parabellum, 124 grains, full metal jacket. Muzzle velocity, more than eight hundred miles an hour. Time to target, less than a fifteenth of a second. Virtually instantaneous.”

— Lee Child

136. “People who say “no” right away are usually lying. A truthful person is perfectly capable of saying “no” but generally they stop and think about it first. And they add “sorry” or something like that. Maybe they come out with some questions of their own. It’s human nature. They say, “Sorry, no, why, what happened?”

— Lee Child

137. “The shop across the light from the pay phone was representative. It had maroon paint and exposed brick and scarred wood, and a chalkboard menu about ninety percent full of things that don’t really belong in coffee, like dairy products of various types and temperatures, and weird nut-based flavorings, and many other assorted pollutants.”

— Lee Child

138. “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

139. “Reacher said, “I wish I could send you ahead. Instead of me. You’re a grown-up. I don’t care what happens to you. Come if you want. Stay with us all the way. But stay with us on my left-hand side.” “Why that?” “I’m right-handed. I like freedom of movement.” “Understood. Let’s go.”

— Lee Child

140. “It’s been running for years. On social media. Conspiracy theories. Attempts to undermine the mainstream media.”

— Lee Child

141. “Reacher got to them on the plane. He put them out of action and stole their wallets.” “On the plane?” “He broke Lozano’s fingers and Baldacci’s arms and no one noticed.” “That’s not possible.” “Apparently it is. One against two, on an airplane, with a hundred witnesses. It’s a blatant humiliation. And now he’s renting cars on our dime? Who does this guy think he is?”

— Lee Child

142. “Civilian notions about unreasonable search and seizure and warrants and probable cause stop at an army post main gate.”

— Lee Child

143. “Inside was a ten-digit keypad. A combination lock. One through nine, plus zero, laid out like a telephone. A possible 3,628,800 variants. It.”

— Lee Child

144. “The plane turned onto the runway, amid noisy billows of dry brown air, and it accelerated slowly, complacently, as if fully aware the mysteries of flight had been worked out long ago, and it lifted off calmly, and glinted in the sun, and sideslipped in the haze, and curved upward on trails of soot, setting a dark but graceful course north and east.”

— Lee Child

145. “Fatherhood was up there as one of the most commonplace male experiences in all of human history. But to Reacher it had always seemed unlikely. Just purely theoretical. Like winning the Nobel Prize, or playing in the World Series, or being able to sing. Possible in principle, but always likely to pass him by. A destination for other people, but not for him.”

— Lee Child

146. “Facts were to be faced, not fought.”

— Lee Child

147. “Some kind of internecine conflict, over the spoils.”

— Lee Child

148. “The Pentagon was built because World War Two was coming, and because World War Two was coming it was built without much steel. Steel was needed elsewhere, as always in wartime. Thus the giant building was a monument to the strength and mass of concrete. So much sand was needed for the mix it was dredged right out of the Potomac River, not far from the rising walls themselves. Nearly a million tons of it. The result was extreme solidity.”

— Lee Child

149. “A military policeman deals with military lawbreakers. Those lawbreakers are service guys. Highly trained in weapons, sabotage, unarmed combat. Rangers, Green Berets, marines. Not just killers. Trained killers. Extremely well trained, at huge public expense. So the military policeman is trained even better. Better with weapons. Better unarmed.”

— Lee Child

150. “Attacking me was like pushing open a forbidden door. What waited on the other side was his problem.”

— Lee Child