Quotes from Lee Child

were under the very erroneous impression that we had money. Of

Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.'" Alice

We both sat there mute, as if we were in a no-talking competition and serious about winning. I

On his day of demobilization a lugubrious one-armed, one-eyed brigadier wished him well and then added, apropos of nothing, "Mark my words, Moutier, a great war leaves a country with three armies: an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves.

Both were military. That was clear.Reacher could tell by their haircuts. No civilian barber would be as pragmatic or as brutal.

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.

You need infinite patience. No use fretting or worrying. You just wait. Doing nothing, thinking nothing, burning no energy. Then you burst into action. After an hour, five hours, a day, a week. Waiting is a skill like anything else.

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.

Some officers of his acquaintance had barked and yelled and shouted. He had always found it more effective to speak low and quiet, enunciating clearly and precisely as if to an idiot child, bearing down with an icy stare. That way he had found the implied menace to be unmistakable.

I took my right hand off the wheel and reverse-punched him square between the eyes. It was a good solid smack. It put him right back to sleep. Manual anesthetic. He stayed out all the way back to the post.

Life," Joe said. "What a completely weird thing it is. A person lives sixty years, does all kinds of things, knows all kinds of things, feels all kinds of things, and then it's over. Like it never happened at all." "We'll always remember her." "No, we'll remember parts of her. The parts she chose to share. The tip of the iceberg. The rest, only she knew about. Therefore the rest already doesn't exist. As of now.

A lesson learned long ago: the human brain was much more sensitive to side-to-side displacement than front-to-back. An evolutionary quirk, presumably, like most things.

Forty thousand suicides every year in America. One every thirteen minutes. Statistically we're more likely to kill ourselves than each other. Who knew?

She nodded a greeting and took a muffin and a cup of coffee. Then she left again. I took two muffins and an empty cup and a whole box of coffee. I figured I could prop it on the edge of the conference table with the spigot facing toward me. Refills as and when required. Like an alcoholic behind a bar.

Canada's army is three men and a dog. They probably keep their stuff forever.

Be on as few pieces of paper as it is possible for a human being to be.

Now you had one come back, Harley.

I'm not much to talk about. What you see is what you get.

Reacher smiled. Bad luck and trouble, been my only friends.

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

A military policeman deals with military lawbreakers. Those lawbreakers are service guys. Highly trained in weapons, sabotage, unarmed combat. Rangers, Green Berets, marines. Not just killers. Trained killers. Extremely well trained, at huge public expense. So the military policeman is trained even better. Better with weapons. Better unarmed.

OK," Reacher said. "It wasn't a colonel. It was a one-star general.

learned a long time ago that some things were worth being afraid of. And some things were not. Things that he had done before and survived did not justify fear. To be afraid of a survivable thing was irrational.

She closed her eyes and opened them a moment later, like she was erasing the conversation from her memory.