Top 350 Lee Child Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Never revive a guy who had just pulled a gun on you.”

— Lee Child

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

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

— Lee Child

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

— Lee Child

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

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

— Lee Child

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

220. “You know where the word shrapnel comes from?” “Where?” “An eighteenth-century British guy named Henry Shrapnel.” “Really?” “He was a captain in their artillery for eight years. Then he invented an exploding shell, and they promoted him to major. The Duke of Wellington used the shell in the Peninsular Wars, and at the Battle of Waterloo.”

— Lee Child

221. “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

222. “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

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

— Lee Child

224. “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

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

— Lee Child

226. “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

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

— Lee Child

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

— Lee Child

229. “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

230. “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

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

— Lee Child

232. “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

233. “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

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

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

— Lee Child

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

— Lee Child

239. “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

240. “There are only two real people in fiction – the storyteller and the listener.”

— Lee Child

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

— Lee Child

242. “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

243. “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

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

— Lee Child

245. “I’d been a thriller reader all my life.”

— Lee Child

246. “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

247. “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

248. “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

249. “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

250. “Hence 8197. He liked 97 because it was the largest two-digit prime number, and he loved 81 because it was absolutely the only number out of all the literally infinite possibilities whose square root was also the sum of its digits. Square root of eighty-one was nine, and eight and one made nine. No other nontrivial number in the cosmos had that kind of sweet symmetry. Perfect.”

— Lee Child