Top 350 Lee Child Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

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

— Lee Child

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

208. “There was a four-place table with only three chairs. There were what Reacher’s mother had called “touches.” Dried flowers, bottles of virgin olive oil that would never be used, antique spoons. Reacher’s mother had said such things gave a room personality. Reacher himself had been unsure how anything except a person could have personality. He had been a painfully literal child. But over the years he had come to see what his mother had meant. And Vaughan’s kitchen had personality.”

— Lee Child

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

— Lee Child

210. “Surprise was always good. Delay was always fatal. Guys who let a situation unfold in its own good time were just stockpiling problems for themselves.”

— Lee Child

211. “They started the hole in the hog pen, which was a permanent disturbance all by itself. Each hog weighed two hundred pounds, and each hog had four feet. The dirt was always chewed up. Nothing to see from the air, not even with a thermal camera. The picture would white out instantly, from the steaming animals themselves, and their steaming piles and pools of waste. Safe enough.”

— Lee Child

212. “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

213. “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

214. “That kid was every kind of bully. He had a grudge against anyone with one brain cell more. Which was a lot.”

— Lee Child

215. “I’m not much to talk about. What you see is what you get.”

— Lee Child

216. “Your hearing is fine. That’s for sure. What’s the longest word in the Gettysburg Address?” “Which symptom is that?” “Thinking.” He thought. “There are three. All with eleven letters. Proposition, battlefield, and consecrated.” “Now recite the first sentence. Like you were an actor on a stage.” “Lincoln was coming down with smallpox at the time. Did you know that?” “That’s not it.” “I know. That was for extra credit on memory.”

— Lee Child

217. “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

218. “Socratic, they call it in college. All kinds of back and forth, designed to elicit truths implicitly known by all rational beings.”

— Lee Child

219. “Don’t worry,” he said. “There are no wires for NHI cases.” Casey Nice said, “Which are what?” “No humans involved. We’re not very interested.”

— Lee Child

220. “A whole bunch of things happened. Moynahan and the Cadillac driver spun around and around, trying to see it all. Trying to stay eyes-on. First the right-hand helicopter pounced ahead on a wide track to the east, sliding in again behind the town and heading due south, full speed, which was pretty damn fast.”

— Lee Child

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

— Lee Child

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

— Lee Child

223. “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

224. “Special Forces guys were usually small. They were usually lean, fast, and whippy. Built for endurance and stamina and full of smarts and cunning. Like foxes, not like bears.”

— Lee Child

225. “Are you going to write the accident report?” Summer asked. “For Willard? Not yet.” “He’ll expect it today.” “I know. But I’m going to make him ask, one more time.” “Why?” “I guess because it’s a fascinating experience. Like watching maggots writhing around in something that died.” “What died?” “My enthusiasm for getting out of bed in the morning.”

— Lee Child

226. “Based on Tor, which is what they all use. Which was written by the United States Naval Research Laboratory, ironically. To provide a safe haven for political dissidents and whistleblowers, all around the world. Which is the law of unintended consequences, right there, biting the world in the ass. Tor stands for The Onion Router. Because that’s what we’re dealing with here. Layers upon layers upon layers, like the layers of an onion, in the Deep Web itself, and inside all of its separate sites.”

— Lee Child

227. “Rule two: watch his eyes. If they stayed up, he was going to swing. If they dropped down, he was going to kick.”

— Lee Child

228. “Reacher squinted through the glare. They were all looking at him. The sandy guy, Poulton. The woman, Lamarr. The hypertensive, Blake. All three of them from Serial Crimes down in Quantico. Up here to talk to him. Then Deerfield, the New York Bureau chief, a heavyweight. Then the lean guy, Cozo, from Organized Crime, working on the protection rackets. He glanced slowly left to right, and right to left, and finished up back on Deerfield. Then he nodded.”

— Lee Child

229. “Enough, a person might say, if that person lived in the civilized world, the world of movies and television and fair play and decent restraint. But Reacher didn’t live there. He lived in a world where you don’t start fights but you sure as hell finish them, and you don’t lose them either, and he was the inheritor of generations of hard-won wisdom that said the best way to lose them was to assume they were over when they weren’t yet.”

— Lee Child

230. “Neagley hated physical contact. No one knew why. But it was a recognized issue.”

— Lee Child

231. “I felt like a man who wakes alone on a deserted island to find that the rest of the world has stolen away in boats in the night. I felt like I was standing on a shore, watching small receding shapes on the horizon. I felt like I had been speaking English, and now I realized everyone else had been speaking a different language entirely. The world was changing. And I didn’t want it to.”

— Lee Child

232. “Staring isn’t difficult. I can do it all day long. Without blinking, if I want to, which is sometimes painful, but always useful. The trick is to not really look at them, but to focus ten yards beyond, on nothing, which produces a glassy effect, which makes them worry, mostly about what’s going on behind your empty eyes.”

— Lee Child

233. “Especially about how hard it was for ex-military people. They entered the civilian world with all the wrong assumptions. They expected the same kind of certainties they had known before. The straightforwardness, the transparency, the honesty, the shared sacrifice.”

— Lee Child

234. “OK,” Reacher said. He found a ten and a five in his pocket, and paid for the phone. His change came in coins, expertly reckoned and deftly dispensed.”

— Lee Child

235. “SAWs were not metal things with little teeth, good for cutting wood. SAWs were Squad Automatic Weapons, which were fearsome fully-automatic machine guns, with fearsome capacities and fearsome capabilities.”

— Lee Child

236. “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

237. “I felt a little envious for a second. If I got offed in the woods late one night, I doubted if three tough guys would go straight to someone’s office, eight in the morning, champing at the bit, ready for revenge. Then I looked at the three of them again and thought, This particular perp could be in a shitload of trouble. All I’d have to do is drop a name.”

— Lee Child

238. “Reacher waited. A minute later a car came driving out of town, but it was full. Two in the front, two in the back. No room for a hitchhiker, especially one as large as Reacher. He recognized people he had seen in the diner, disconsolate and complaining, boots on and ready, backpacks piled in the corner, no place to go.”

— Lee Child

239. “Admit nothing, even on your deathbed. You might suddenly get better.”

— Lee Child

240. “He was moving in the chair. Imperceptibly. Tiny violent movements, from side to side. Like he was fighting two alternating opponents, one on his left, one on his right. Like he knew he had to tell me where he had been, but like he knew he couldn’t. He was jumping around like the absolute flesh-and-blood definition of a rock and a hard place.”

— Lee Child

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

— Lee Child

242. “She had used a simile, to explain and flatter and apologize all at once. She had written, “You’re like New York City. I love to visit, but I could never live there.”

— Lee Child

243. “Any day could be the last of life or liberty, so small pleasures were always worth pursuing.”

— Lee Child

244. “He had learned a long time ago that some things were worth being afraid of. And some things were not. Things that he had done before and survived did not justify fear. To be afraid of a survivable thing was irrational.”

— Lee Child

245. “Canada’s army is three men and a dog. They probably keep their stuff forever.”

— Lee Child

246. “I know now, like drumbeats. Portentous, and a little sinister, like tympani strikes at the start of a gloomy symphony. Shostakovich, maybe.”

— Lee Child

247. “A crowd two hundred strong was the largest animal on the face of the earth. The heaviest, the hardest to control, the hardest to stop. The hardest to kill. Big targets, but after-action reports always showed that crowds took much less than one casualty per round fired.”

— Lee Child

248. “The round hit the guy high on the back, dead center, at the base of the neck. A spine shot. Lucky. Reacher had been aiming lower, at center mass. The biggest part of the target. Always safest. With an in-built advantage. Center meant center. There was stuff on the edges, side to side, and especially up and down. The legs and the head. Misses had somewhere to go.”

— Lee Child

249. “Fatherhood. Always unlikely. Like winning the Nobel Prize, or playing in the World Series. Not for him.”

— Lee Child

250. “They approached the motel’s horseshoe from the south, so the first thing they saw was the wing with the office in it. There were three things on the sidewalk under its window. The first was the plastic lawn chair, unoccupied, but still in its overnight position. The second thing was Keever’s battered valise, last seen in room 215, now repacked and waiting, all bulging and forlorn. The third thing was Chang’s own suitcase, zipped up, its handle raised, also repacked and waiting.”

— Lee Child