Top 350 Lee Child Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Lee Child

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

— Lee Child

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “We’ve already got gays in the military. We always have had. World War Two, the Western Allies had fourteen million men in uniform. Any kind of reasonable probability says at least a million of them were gay. And we won that war, as I recall, last time I checked with the history books. We won it big time.”

— Lee Child

259. “You know who Nicolaus Copernicus is?” “Was,” Walker said. “Some old astronomer. Polish, I think. Proved the earth goes around the sun.” Reacher nodded. “And much more than that, by implication. He asked us all to consider how likely is it that we’re at the absolute center of things? What are the odds? That what we’re seeing is somehow exceptional? The very best or the very worst? It’s an important philosophical point.”

— Lee Child

260. “Smoke alarms are compulsory in homes because they contain cameras and microphones wirelessly linked to the government. With poison gas capsules too, in case the government doesn’t like what you’re saying or doing.”

— Lee Child

261. “I went to college. West Point is technically a college.”

— Lee Child

262. “When the hole was done they backed the machine up and turned it around and used the front bucket to push Keever into his grave, scraping him, rolling him, covering his body with dirt, until finally it fell over the lip and thumped down into the electric shadows.”

— Lee Child

263. “They were all in line, single file, like an armada from hell. It was a magnificent sight.”

— Lee Child

264. “The woman led us into a living room. A decent-sized space. Expensive furniture and rugs. A big TV. No stereo, no books. It all looked a bit halfhearted. Like somebody had spent twenty minutes with a catalog and ten thousand dollars.”

— Lee Child

265. “There was a small wire-mesh holder on the counter, full of business cards supplied by the MoneyGram franchise. A side benefit, presumably, along with the commission. Reacher took a card and read it. The guy’s name was not Maloney. Reacher asked him, “You got a local phone book?” “What for?” “I want to balance it on my head to improve my deportment.” “What?” “I want to look up a number. What else is a phone book for?”

— Lee Child

266. “He found people respond to crises in two ways. Some get to work fixing the problem. Others, proving the problem wasn’t their fault. Reacher liked the first kind. Rutherford seemed like the first kind. It was nice to see someone not dumping on him for a change.”

— Lee Child

267. “Lowell’s an odd duck,” Peterson said. “He’s a loner. He reads books.”

— Lee Child

268. “Forty thousand suicides every year in America. One every thirteen minutes. Statistically we’re more likely to kill ourselves than each other.”

— Lee Child

269. “The only opponents Reacher truly feared were small whippy guys with fast hands and sharp blades.”

— Lee Child

270. “The guy said, “We don’t know if the somebody is a Chinaman. That information would have helped, I guess.”

— Lee Child

271. “The most unbearable type of anger is a woman’s – do anything to avoid it.”

— Lee Child

272. “Three guys. No doubt the Maricopa County DA would call them invaders. As in, a home invasion turned tragic tonight, in an exclusive gated community northeast of town. Film at eleven. The cops would call them perpetrators. Their lawyers would call them clients. Politicians would call them scum. Criminologists would call them sociopaths. Sociologists would call them misunderstood. The 110th MP would call them dead men walking.”

— Lee Child

273. “First you spend a lot of time and money making the grass grow, just so you can spend a lot of time and money cutting it down again a little while later.”

— Lee Child

274. “Reacher hated turning back. He liked to press on, dead ahead, whatever.”

— Lee Child

275. “For a military cop, walking into a bar is like a batter stepping to the plate.”

— Lee Child

276. “Don’t go anywhere, don’t do anything, don’t call anyone. I guessed talking with the guy would amount to doing something, which would contravene the don’t do anything part of the command. But then, breathing was doing something, technically. So was metabolizing. My hair was growing, my beard was growing, all twenty of my nails were growing, I was losing weight. It was impossible not to do anything. So I decided that component of the order was purely rhetorical.”

— Lee Child

277. “But then the Hispanic guy spoke. Maybe a heartfelt statement, full of apology and contrition, full of promises of future reform, and likely polite, and certainly short, but apparently there was something in it the fat man wanted to either rebut or comment on further, because he settled back down, amid much asynchronous wobbling and shaking, and he started talking again.”

— Lee Child

278. “I checked my appearance, to make sure I was fit for public consumption.”

— Lee Child

279. “I could tell you, but then I’d have to bill you.”

— Lee Child

280. “I fed the phone again and dialed the Chief of Staff’s office, deep inside the Pentagon. A woman’s voice answered. It was a perfect Washington voice. Not high, not low, cultured, elegant, nearly accentless.”

— Lee Child

281. “There were pictures on the walls, all of them dime-store prints of Jesus. In all of them Jesus had blue eyes and wore pale blue robes and had long blond hair and a neat blond beard. He looked more like a Malibu surfer than a Jew from two thousand years ago.”

— Lee Child

282. “They checked in and washed up and met in the restaurant for dinner. It was a pretty room, with plenty of crisp white linen. There were couples and foursomes in there. They were the only threesome. Trysts and deals were going on all around them. Westwood got the internet on his phone and said, “Forty thousand suicides every year in America. One every thirteen minutes. Statistically we’re more likely to kill ourselves than each other. Who knew?”

— Lee Child

283. “OK,” Reacher said. “It wasn’t a colonel. It was a one-star general.”

— Lee Child

284. “The little green Ford had regular front-hinged doors, like most cars, and the doors had a restraint about two-thirds of the way through their travel, so stepping out meant stepping back too, which improved Reacher’s angle. It put the engine block between him and the two guys. If they drew down immediately and started shooting from the get-go, he could hit the deck behind a bulletproof shield. If they had guns. Which was not proven.”

— Lee Child

285. “The guy said, “If you’d taken that punch on the upper arm, you’d expect one hell of a bruise. Which is exactly what you got. Not on the outside. Not enough flesh. The bruise is on the inside. On your brain. With a twin across the hall, because your brain bounced from side to side in your skull like a goldfish in a test tube. What we call coup and contre-coup.”

— Lee Child

286. “Reacher’s personal rule of thumb was never to revive a guy who had just pulled a gun on him. He was fairly inflexible on the matter.”

— Lee Child

287. “He’s worth having. All I got was two fake lawsuits.” “Seems like Morgan’s value just went down, as part of a credible.”

— Lee Child

288. “The daylight was sliced thinner and thinner until it disappeared completely, leaving us with nothing but the dim glow of electric bulbs, in fixtures slung from the rafters high above our heads.”

— Lee Child

289. “Either it was general reconnaissance ahead of a further incursion at a future date, in which case it had likely involved cameras and thermal imaging and ground-penetrating radar, or it was the actual search for Keever itself, which they had long predicted would include the air, in which case it would involve pretty much the same technology, but it would find nothing either, because of the hogs.”

— Lee Child

290. “Now you had one come back, Harley.”

— Lee Child

291. “Don’t underestimate the attraction of your ass, Roscoe, whatever you do.”

— Lee Child

292. “The whole point of drifting was happy passive acceptance of no alternatives. Having alternatives ruined it.”

— Lee Child

293. “It helped a lonely man feel connected and isolated both at the same time.”

— Lee Child

294. “Suppose twenty years ago Congress had proposed a law saying every citizen had to wear a radio transponder around his neck, all day and all night, so the government could track him wherever he went. Can you imagine the outrage? But instead the citizens went right ahead and did it to themselves. In their pockets and purses, not around their necks, but the outcome is the same.”

— Lee Child

295. “They went in, and the guy behind the counter looked up. He was about forty, tall and well built, not fat but certainly fleshed out, with a full head of hair, and a guileless face.”

— Lee Child

296. “The guy said nothing in reply to that, and Reacher stepped back and closed the door on him. Chang said, “If our aim is to get out of here alive, I don’t think you should be antagonizing them.”

— Lee Child

297. “So he died, because for a split-second he got brave. But not then. He died much later, after the split-second of bravery had faded into long hours of wretched gasping fear, and after the long hours of fear had exploded into long minutes of insane screaming panic.”

— Lee Child

298. “Most actors are small, anyway – at least compared to me.”

— Lee Child

299. “I wanted readers to be genuinely unsure as to whether she’s telling the truth or lying. It meant making her partly sympathetic, and partly unsympathetic, which wasn’t easy.”

— Lee Child

300. “Some officers of his acquaintance had barked and yelled and shouted. He had always found it more effective to speak low and quiet, enunciating clearly and precisely as if to an idiot child, bearing down with an icy stare. That way he had found the implied menace to be unmistakable.”

— Lee Child