Quotes from Lee Child

operation was for me. I had been in town less than a half-hour. The other five had probably been here all their lives. Any problem with any of them and an embarrassed sergeant would have shuffled in. He would be apologetic. He would mumble to them.

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.

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.

you know much about head injuries?' 'only the ones I cause

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

fence as far as the missing panel. Then he started to run toward it. Then he died. I swung the sap and hit him. But he didn't go

No one expects a head butt. Humans don't hit things with their heads. Some inbuilt atavistic instinct says so. A head butt changes the game. It adds a kind of unhinged savagery to the mix. An unprovoked head butt is like bringing a sawed-off shotgun to a knife fight. The guy went down like an empty suit.

Resolute, responsible, determined, knowledgeable, and perceptive

As a general rule. it's a comfort issue, literally and metaphorically. And intimacy issue. It's a big step, putting on foreign underwear. Like betrayal, or emigration.

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

Some kind of internecine conflict, over the spoils.

The best defense against knives was distance. The best countermove was entanglement.

the open! So go for it! Jump on it! Just gobble it right up! "I don't know," he said. "We need to talk about it," she said. But there was no more talking to be done, not then, because the buzzer from the lobby started up an insistent squawk, like somebody was down there on the street leaning on the button. Jodie stood

Tony Swan, Jorge Sanchez, Calvin Franz, Frances Neagley, Stanley Lowrey, Manuel Orozco, David O'Donnell, and Karla Dixon.

The guy with Bennett let go of his elbow and started patting his pockets. He came out with the switchblade, now closed up again, and a Sig Sauer automatic, a P226, I thought, favored by Special Forces everywhere.

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.

They say that you need to ride the rails for a while to understand the traveling blues. They're wrong. To understand the traveling blues you need to be locked down somewhere. In a cell. Or in the army. Someplace where you're caged. Someplace where smokestack lightning looks like a faraway beacon of impossible freedom.

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.

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.

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.

Always love or money. And it can't be love, because love makes you crazy, and this guy isn't crazy.

again. He had crashed through the barrier. He had stopped worrying and started relaxing. He was up on that plateau where you just did whatever needed doing. I knew that place.

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

Jodie didn't need it explained to her that her father had been one of the good guys. She knew. She was moving with the serenity of a person who had loved the old guy all her life, and had been loved back. There was nothing she had neglected to tell him, nothing he had neglected to tell her. People live, and then they die, and as long as they do both things properly, there's nothing much to regret.