Top 350 Lee Child Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “A real coin flipped by a real human trended closer to 51-49 in favor of whichever side was uppermost at the outset. No one could explain exactly why, but the phenomenon was easily observed in experiments. Something to do with multiple axes of spin, and wobble, and aerodynamics, and the general difference between theory and practice.”

— Lee Child

153. “The best defense against knives was distance. The best countermove was entanglement.”

— Lee Child

154. “And most people stick to underwear from their country of origin.” “Do they?” “As a general rule. It’s a comfort issue, literally and metaphorically. And an intimacy issue. It’s a big step, putting on foreign underwear. Like betrayal, or emigration.”

— Lee Child

155. “Tony Swan, Jorge Sanchez, Calvin Franz, Frances Neagley, Stanley Lowrey, Manuel Orozco, David O’Donnell, and Karla Dixon.”

— Lee Child

156. “I applied what the unofficial Humvee manual called 2-40 air-conditioning, which meant you opened two windows and drove at forty miles an hour.”

— Lee Child

157. “There was nothing in his pockets except paper money and an expired passport and an ATM card and a clip-together toothbrush.”

— Lee Child

158. “We live in strange times. Poor people are fat, and rich people are thin. That never happened before.”

— Lee Child

159. “The hardcover book was an academic monograph from a Midwestern university about the Battle of Kursk. Kursk happened in July of 1943. It was Nazi Germany’s last grand offensive of World War Two and its first major defeat on an open battlefield. It turned into the greatest tank battle the world has ever seen, and ever will see, unless people like Kramer himself are eventually turned loose.”

— Lee Child

160. “Everything you could want – action, suspense, character and setting, all floating on the easy lyricism of a fine writer at the top of his game.”

— Lee Child

161. “Reacher thanked the guy for the ride, and got out, and watched the truck squeal away, each tire insisting the other three were wrong.”

— Lee Child

162. “He had no place to go, and all the time in the world to get there, so detours cost him nothing.”

— Lee Child

163. “There was a toilet in the far corner, with nothing in it except basic facilities and about a trillion bacteria. It was like a huge three-dimensional petri dish.”

— Lee Child

164. “Always love or money. And it can’t be love, because love makes you crazy, and this guy isn’t crazy.”

— Lee Child

165. “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.”

— Lee Child

166. “He had big wrists. They were as thick as most men’s ankles. Summer stood next to the map, staring at the pushpins, like she was leading his gaze toward them and saying: We know. I sat at my desk. “What’s your name?” I said. “For the record.” “Trifonov,” he said. His accent was heavy and abrupt, all in his throat.”

— Lee Child

167. “The doctor smiled briefly and balanced the bar across his palms again. “It’s handsome, in its way,” he said. “Does that sound strange?” I knew what he meant. It was a nice piece of steel, and it was everything it needed to be and nothing it didn’t. Like a Colt Detective Special, or a K-bar, or a cockroach.”

— Lee Child

168. “You need infinite patience. No use fretting or worrying. You just wait. Doing nothing, thinking nothing, burning no energy. Then you burst into action. After an hour, five hours, a day, a week. Waiting is a skill like anything else.”

— Lee Child

169. “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

170. “The big guys like Google weren’t always big. Once they were two kids in a garage. Or a dorm room. Some of them set out to be billionaires from the get-go, but some of them didn’t. Some of them got just caught up in solving an interesting problem, which happened to be worth billions later.”

— Lee Child

171. “The edge of the world crept into view, at least to the straining wide-open eyes, limned and outlined in gray on gray, infinitely dim, infinitely subtle, hardly there at all, part imagination, and part hope. Then pale gold fingers probed the gray, moving, ethereal, as if deciding. And then spreading, igniting some thin and distant layer one molecule at a time, one lumen, lighting it up slowly, turning it luminous and transparent, the glass of the bowl, not white and cold, but tinted warmer.”

— Lee Child

172. “He was listed as right-handed. The army needed to know that because bolt-action sniper rifles are made for right-handers. Left-handed soldiers don’t usually get assigned as snipers. Pigeonholing starts on day one in the military.”

— Lee Child

173. “There’s a difference between hearing and listening. And that’s our problem. I doubt if Westwood even knows what he’s got. He didn’t listen, and his notes don’t seem to mean much. It’s going to be like picking a lock with spaghetti.”

— Lee Child

174. “The grounds had an iron fence set in a stone knee wall, which was just wide enough for a small person to sit on, and Turner was a small person, and Reacher was used to being uncomfortable.”

— Lee Child

175. “He also said the day we see the truth and cease to speak is the day we begin to die.”

— Lee Child

176. “His eyes were closed, which made it not much of a fair fight, but those are always my favorite kind.”

— Lee Child

177. “When we found it you said the number would be either the client, or a source of independent corroboration, or a source of further information.”

— Lee Child

178. “The guy stood a yard inside the dark room and waited, blinking, letting his eyes adjust to the gloom after the hot whiteness of the Key West sun. It was June, dead-on four o’clock in the afternoon, the southernmost part of the United States. Way farther south than most of the Bahamas. A hot white sun and a fierce temperature. Reacher sat at his table in back and sipped water from a plastic bottle and waited.”

— Lee Child

179. “The most sustained feat of imagination in mystery fiction today.”

— Lee Child

180. “You’re really asking me a different question,” she said. “You’re asking, how can I abandon you? You’re asking, aren’t I concerned with your affairs anymore? Don’t I want to see what happens with your lives? Have I lost interest in you?”

— Lee Child

181. “A person either runs or he fights. It’s a binary choice, and I’m a fighter.”

— Lee Child

182. “They all shared Stan’s personal allegiance to the famous old saying: War is not about dying for your country. It’s about making the other guy die for his.”

— Lee Child

183. “Nine o’clock in the morning, the World Trade Center on its own is the sixth largest city in New York State. Bigger than Albany. Only sixteen acres of land, but a daytime population of 130,000 people.”

— Lee Child

184. “I felt alienated by the experience and decided to stay away from corporate employment.”

— Lee Child

185. “Resolute, responsible, determined, knowledgeable, and perceptive.”

— Lee Child

186. “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

187. “There was nothing else in Carbone’s six-by-eight cell. Nothing significant, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing explanatory. Nothing that revealed his history, his nature, his passions, or his interests. He had lived his life in secret, buttoned down, like his Saturday-night shirts.”

— Lee Child

188. “The first sheet was an analysis of the problems that Armored was facing. The integrated units, the loss of prestige. The possibility of ceding command to others. It was gloomy, but it was conventional. And it was accurate, according to the Chief of Staff.”

— Lee Child

189. “I can’t worry about something I can’t change.”

— Lee Child

190. “He understood the theory. In an emergency people would have to exit that way, out through the window and over the wing. Hence all kinds of regulations mandated a minimum space, so people would be comfortable on their way through, except that if such a thing existed as a minimum space for a person to be comfortable, then why wasn’t every row just as capacious? It was a regulatory conundrum he couldn’t unravel.”

— Lee Child

191. “That was for damn sure.”

— Lee Child

192. “I was in television drama, which is a first cousin to the movies, and I trust myself to make the right decisions.”

— Lee Child

193. “California, Reacher thought. There was a sedan at the curb. It had been waiting there for them. A big car, black, expensive. The driver was leaning across and behind the front passenger seat. He was stretching over to pop the rear door. The guy opposite Reacher motioned with his gun again. Reacher didn’t move. He glanced left and right. He figured he had about another second and a half to make some kind.”

— Lee Child

194. “The most unbelievable scene in any action movie was the part where Tom Cruise jammed the thumb drive into the slot and it slid in on the first try.”

— Lee Child

195. “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

196. “We both sat there mute, as if we were in a no-talking competition and serious about winning.”

— Lee Child

197. “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

198. “I felt like someone else. I felt like a normal person. But I got over it.”

— Lee Child

199. “Then the city went silent and took a breath and shiny darkness owned the streets. That was Reacher’s time. He liked to picture the sleeping people stacked twelve, thirty, fifty stories high, often head to head with perfect strangers on opposite sides of thin apartment walls, deep in slumber, unaware of the tall quiet man striding beneath them in the shadows.”

— Lee Child

200. “I’m going to twist his arm out of his shoulder socket and beat him to death with his own right hand.”

— Lee Child