Quotes from Lee Child

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

Second conclusion: If you can see a bandwagon, it's too late to get on. I think the person who said that to me

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.

People say that knowledge is power. The more knowledge, the more power. Suppose you knew the winning numbers for the lottery? All of them? Not guessed them, not dreamed them, but really knew them? What would you do? You would run to the store, is what. You would mark those numbers on the playslip. And you would win.

second rule, learned from a lifetime of bad luck and trouble: Maintain a little dignity.

Reacher remembered a line from an old song: Set the controls for the heart of the sun.

Fiction comprises stories about things that never happened to people who didn't exist.

ask once, ask twice if you must, but for God's sake don't ask three times.

The guy offered his left fist. Reacher bumped it with his right, behind DeLong's back. Not the first time his knuckles had touched a Sox fan, but by far the gentlest.

People live, and then they die, and as long as they do both things properly, there's nothing much to regret.

It had maroon paint and exposed brick and scarred wood, and a chalkboard menu about ninety percent full of things that don't really belong in coffee, like dairy products of various types and temperatures, and weird nut-based flavorings, and many other assorted pollutants.

Psychologists figured that the memory center was located in the left brain, and the imagination engine in the right brain. Therefore people unconsciously glanced to the left when they were remembering things, and to the right when they were making stuff up. When

While Roscoe made cups of coffee for Charlie Hubble and Finlay sat in the rosewood office

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.

I can't worry about something I can't change.

I had worked my butt off for those bastards. I was good at my job. I had made them a fortune. And they just slung me out like suddenly I was shit on their shoe. And I was scared. I was going to lose it all, right? And I was tired. I couldn't start again at the bottom of something else. I was too old and I had no energy. I just didn't know what to do.

Because deep down to the army a wounded soldier that can't fight anymore is garbage. So we depend on civilians, and civilians don't care either.

Second conclusion: If you can see a bandwagon, it's too late to get on.

Then the city went silent and took a breath and shiny darkness owned the streets. That was Reacher's time. He liked to picture the sleeping people stacked twelve, thirty, fifty stories high, often head to head with perfect strangers on opposite sides of thin apartment walls, deep in slumber, unaware of the tall quiet man striding beneath them in the shadows.

Two choices, as always: fight or flight. We were on 56th Street's southern sidewalk. I could have run straight across the road and tried to get away. But Leonid and his pal were probably faster than me. The law of averages. Most humans are faster than me. The old lady in the summer dress was probably faster than me. Her old gray mutt was probably faster than me.

Being ex-military is like being a lapsed Catholic. Even though they're way in the back of your mind, the old rituals still exert a powerful pull.

pity the man who gets what he wants. And it's better to travel hopefully than to arrive.

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.

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?