Quotes from Lee Child

The cool factor lies not in setting a mystery on another planet, but in making it the only place your story could have had the same ending.

outside the door. He breathed in, and he breathed

If I wanted easy I would have joined the Marines.

Laziness and complacency.

Zec back toward the living room. The kettle's whistle died away, like an air raid siren winding down. The house went quiet again. "It's over," Reacher said. "You lost." "It's never over," the Zec replied. Hoarse voice

Hackett had plenty of maxillary damage.

She didn't talk. She was thinking. She often was. He knew the signs. He guessed she was processing the information she had received, examining it, turning it this way and that, until she was satisfied.

I have spent my entire career trying to please the reader; I'm not a master, I'm the servant.

You have a cerebral contusion, in Latin contusio cerebri, in fact technically two, both coup and contre

that it's easy enough to shoot a man. But there's absolutely no way to unshoot one.

Both of them had noses like spoiled eggplants. Both of them had two black eyes. Both of them had crusted blood on their lips. Neither one of them

Reacher nodded. He said, "Anything else you can tell me?" Mortimer went quiet so long Reacher thought maybe he had fallen into a geriatric coma. Or died. But then he moved. He raised the same bent and bony hand. This time not a warning. This time an appeal for attention. Like a comedian calming a crowd, ahead of a punch line.

Nobody would dare do that.

lifetime in the service was like rushing down a narrow corridor, eyes fixed firmly to the front. There was all kinds of enticing stuff off to the sides, which you rushed past and ignored. Now he wanted to take the side trips. He wanted a crazy zigzag, any direction he felt like, any old time he wanted. And returning to the same

have gambled and stalled.

Oh." Dr. Houllier scratched the side of his head. "Then, what about these apes? You can't leave them on my floor. Especially not that big one. I treated him after one of his victims bit him and his arm got infected. He's called Mansour. He's a psychopath. What will he do when he wakes up and finds me? It's obvious I helped you.

Eventually a guy behind the hog farmer broke ranks, and stepped forward. A pragmatist, clearly. He walked to the car and lifted the hatchback and put the bags inside, one by one, first Keever's, then Chang's.

before the doctors. Right here in Chicago. We

realpolitik

The shorter the time, the cooler you have got to be. If you've got only one shot, you've got to make it count. You can't afford to miss because you screwed up the planning.

It's what we say in the army when we're going to beat someone to death.

Something we used to say in the MPs. Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth.

He left home early, as he always did, six days a week, fifty weeks a year. A cautious breakfast, appropriate to a short round man aiming to stay in shape through his forties. A long walk down the carpeted corridors of a lakeside house appropriate to a man who earned a thousand dollars on each of those three hundred days he worked. A thumb on the button of the garage-door

Zeno spoke Greek, not Latin, and preferred passive resignation to reckless optimism.