Top 350 Lee Child Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “There was nothing in his pockets except paper money and an expired passport and an ATM card and a clip-together toothbrush.”

— Lee Child

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

— Lee Child

153. “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

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

— Lee Child

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

— Lee Child

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

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

— Lee Child

166. “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

167. “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

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

— Lee Child

169. “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

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

— Lee Child

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

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

— Lee Child

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

— Lee Child

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

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

— Lee Child

180. “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

181. “That was for damn sure.”

— Lee Child

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

— Lee Child

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

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

— Lee Child

189. “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

190. “Never revive a guy who had just pulled a gun on you.”

— Lee Child

191. “Short of a shotgun, a pool cue is the best barroom weapon ever invented. Short enough to be handy, long enough to be useful, made out of fine hardwood and nicely weighted with lead.”

— Lee Child

192. “The pilot was military, so he was using the rudder. Civilian pilots avoid using the rudder. Using the rudder makes the plane slew, like a car skids. Passengers don’t like the feeling. So civilian pilots turn by juicing the engines on one side and backing off on the others. Then the plane comes around smoothly.”

— Lee Child

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

— Lee Child

194. “She closed her eyes and opened them a moment later, like she was erasing the conversation from her memory.”

— Lee Child

195. “Reacher liked New York more than most places. He liked the casual indifference of it all and the frantic hustle and the total anonymity.”

— Lee Child

196. “The guy said, “Hop in the back.” He craned around in his seat and batted stray items aside. Reacher opened the door and slid in and used his hip to finish the job. He closed the door and the woman hit the gas and they took off, cruising easy through the last thirty-some miles of America.”

— Lee Child

197. “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

198. “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

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

— Lee Child

200. “This is why we need more women officers. For us it’s enough to win. For you, the other guy has to know he lost.”

— Lee Child