Top 350 Lee Child Quotes (2026 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. “It’s been running for years. On social media. Conspiracy theories. Attempts to undermine the mainstream media.”

— Lee Child

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

— Lee Child

154. “Revising objectives is smart because it stops you throwing good money after bad.”

— Lee Child

155. “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

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

— Lee Child

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

— Lee Child

158. “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

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

— Lee Child

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

— Lee Child

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

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

— 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. “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 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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

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

— Lee Child

173. “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

174. “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

175. “Three weapons firing. Long guns. All the same. Distinctive. Flat solid barks, and the crack of fast bullets in the air. NATO rounds out of M16s, if Reacher was a gambling man. All of them so far missing. Understandable. It was a deceptive shot. Two hundred yards, absolutely flat, eye to eye. Except it was absolutely curved, because it was part of a spherical planet. Hence the miscalculation.”

— Lee Child

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

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

— Lee Child

184. “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

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

— Lee Child

186. “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

187. “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

188. “Sooner or later you ended up an orphan. There was no escaping it.”

— Lee Child

189. “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

190. “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

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

— Lee Child

192. “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

193. “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

194. “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

195. “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

196. “No military service?” “No.” “I thought not,” Reacher said. “You let us take the high ground. Which was dumb. Because thirty guys don’t mean squat if they have to come up a staircase two by two. You know we’re armed. We could pick you off like squirrels. From inside a cinder block building. Which you can’t hurt unless you’re packing grenade launchers, which I don’t think you are. So don’t come up the stairs again. Especially not in the lead.”

— Lee Child

197. “He drew back the string an extra inch. The arrowhead moved backward, the same inch, toward his hand, clenched tight around the grip. The bow curved harder. It sang with tension.”

— Lee Child

198. “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

199. “It’s always sad if anybody you know has a personal problem.”

— 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