Top 350 Lee Child Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

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

— Lee Child

256. “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

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

— Lee Child

258. “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

259. “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

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

— Lee Child

261. “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

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

— Lee Child

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

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

— Lee Child

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

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

— Lee Child

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

— Lee Child

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

— Lee Child

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

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

— Lee Child

279. “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

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

— Lee Child

281. “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

282. “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

283. “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

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

— Lee Child

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

— Lee Child

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

— Lee Child

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

— Lee Child

288. “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

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

— Lee Child

290. “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

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

— Lee Child

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

— Lee Child

293. “He had many formal qualifications. He was rated expert on all small arms. He had won an inter-service thousand-yard rifle competition with a record score. Anecdotally his fitness reports rated him well above average in the classroom, excellent in the field, fluently bilingual in English and French, passable in Spanish, outstanding on all man-portable weaponry, and beyond outstanding at hand-to-hand combat. Susan knew what that last rating meant. Like having a running chain saw thrown at you.”

— Lee Child

294. “Life is endlessly capable of surprises, so he knew one day he would come face to face with his physical equal. With somebody who might worry him. But he looked and saw this wasn’t the day. So he just smiled and looked away again.”

— Lee Child

295. “The Python was a double-action weapon, which meant the same trigger pull cocked the hammer and then dropped it, so he started early, getting the cylinder turning while the gun was still moving, seeing the hammer come up, feeling the cams and the levers, waiting, then firing, trusting millisecond timing and momentum and deflection and complex four-dimensional calculations.”

— Lee Child

296. “Reacher was led through the door on the left and onward to an interview room. Which had no windows. Just four blank walls, and a table bolted to the floor, with two chairs on one side and one on the other. The room had not been designed by the dining room guy. That was clear. There was no blond wood or carpet. Just scuffed white paint on cinder block, and a cracked concrete floor, and a fluorescent bulb in a wire cage on the ceiling.”

— Lee Child

297. “Reacher hadn’t seen the guy before. Big hands, broad shoulders, a seamed face, clothes all covered with dirt. Chosen in some way, presumably, to be the point man. To be the spokesperson. The pick of the local litter, no doubt, according to popular acclaim.”

— Lee Child

298. “The problem with getting your rights abused was that somebody had to witness it for it to mean anything. Somebody had to see it happen.”

— Lee Child

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

— Lee Child

300. “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