Quotes from Lee Child

I try to do the right thing. Even though everybody hates us and nobody helps us and nobody thanks us afterward. I think doing the right thing is an end in itself. It has to be, really, doesn't it?

Why didn't you tell us?" She shrugged. Gallic, feminine, obstinate. "What was to tell?" she said.

We'll find you,' Emerson said. 'You won't,' Reacher said. 'Nobody ever has before.' Then

Reacher had no patience for people who claimed that y was a vowel.

The car stank like old taxis do, sweet cloying air freshener and upholstery cleaner. There were a million miles on the clock and it rode like a boat on a swell

Are we going different places?" "Of course we are," she said. "You're looking at the crime scene and I'm going to the DGSE." I nodded. The Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure. The French version of the CIA.

The cell was very dark. I could just about see a bunk bed, a sink and a john.

Sometimes you woke up, and you knew for sure, from history and experience and weary intuition, that the brand new day would bring nothing good at all.

She's a fatalist," I said.

It was in good standing with the State of Illinois. It had articles of association. Shareholders.

He was answered by a long plastic crackle, not a question, but not an instruction either. Softer in tone. Encouragement, maybe. Or reassurance. The one-eyed guy said, "OK, sure," and hung up.

The guy wrote Reacher in a box on a form.

salubrious.

The guy didn't move. He was five inches down in height, maybe thirty pounds in weight, maybe a whole foot in reach. Evidently unarmed, because otherwise his weapon would have been out and in his hand already. Evidently unsettled, too, by Reacher's gaze, which was steady, and calm, and slightly amused, but also undeniably predatory, and even a little unhinged. Not a good situation for the guy to be in.

A problem shared is a problem halved.

But nobody had been interested in inert and prosaic things like crowbars.

contained. And equable.

My driver asked, "Sir, do you have everything you need?" Which in an existential sense was a very big question, but I had no immediate requirements, so I just nodded in the mirror and stayed quiet.

Hope for the best, plan for the worst. That

I'd killed one guy and blinded another. Now I'd have to confront my feelings. But I didn't feel much at all. Nothing, in fact. No guilt, no remorse. None at all. I felt like I'd chased two roaches around that bathroom and stomped on them. But at least a roach is a rational, reasonable, evolved sort of a creature. Those Aryans in that bathroom had been worse than vermin.

A quarantined unit, Sinclair had said, and it felt like it. Three guys in a room, shut away from the outside world, because they were all infected, with an alibi. —

The guy didn't move. He was five inches down in height, maybe thirty pounds in weight, maybe a whole foot in reach. Evidently unarmed, because otherwise his weapon would have been out and in his hand already. Evidently unsettled, too, by Reacher's gaze, which was steady, and calm, and slightly amused, but also undeniably predatory, and even a little unhinged.

I've seen Soviet tank drivers. Dad showed me pictures. Two hundred pounds, big mustaches, smoking pipes, tattoos, and that was just the women.

Balzac wrong when he wrote, 'Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.