Top 350 Lee Child Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Revising objectives is smart because it stops you throwing good money after bad.”

— Lee Child

152. “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

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

— Lee Child

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

— Lee Child

155. “Life,” Joe said. “What a completely weird thing it is. A person lives sixty years, does all kinds of things, knows all kinds of things, feels all kinds of things, and then it’s over. Like it never happened at all.” “We’ll always remember her.” “No, we’ll remember parts of her. The parts she chose to share. The tip of the iceberg. The rest, only she knew about. Therefore the rest already doesn’t exist. As of now.”

— Lee Child

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

— Lee Child

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

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

— Lee Child

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

— Lee Child

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

— Lee Child

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Lee Child

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

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

— Lee Child

177. “Most right-handed people end up walking wide counterclockwise circles, because most right-handed people have left legs fractionally shorter than their right legs. Basic biology and geometry. I avoided that particular peril by stepping to the right of every tenth tree I came to, whether I thought I needed to or not.”

— Lee Child

178. “Searching the Deep Web is technically elegant, but being in it can be unpleasant. It has a bit of everything, but ultimately it’s a three-legged stool. A third of it is a vast criminal marketplace, where everything is for sale, from your credit card number to murder. There are auction sites where hit men compete for jobs. Lowest bid wins. There are sites where you can specify how your wife should die, and there are contractors who will give you a custom quote.”

— Lee Child

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

— Lee Child

180. “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

181. “Second conclusion: If you can see a bandwagon, it’s too late to get on.”

— Lee Child

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

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

— Lee Child

186. “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

187. “That was for damn sure.”

— Lee Child

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

— Lee Child

189. “One presenter was reporting on the fatal shooting of a suspected organized crime figure behind a downtown strip club, which involved much breathless speculation laid over meaningless pictures, mostly of the closed gate in the pink fence, above a ticker that said Moscow Comes to Phoenix, which Reacher figured would annoy Ukrainians everywhere, the two countries being entirely separate now, and proud of it, at least in one direction.”

— Lee Child

190. “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

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

— Lee Child

192. “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

193. “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

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

— Lee Child

195. “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

196. “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

197. “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

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

— Lee Child

199. “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

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

— Lee Child