Quotes About Silence

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

Reacher said nothing.

Reacher said nothing. We can't fight thirty people. To which Reacher's natural response was: Why the hell not?

Webster lapsed into silence. Started thinking hard. He was a smart enough bureaucrat to know if you can't beat them, you join them. You force yourself to think like they think.

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

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.

He also said the day we see the truth and cease to speak is the day we begin to die.

The guy said nothing in reply to that, and Reacher stepped back and closed the door on him. Chang said, "If our aim is to get out of here alive, I don't think you should be antagonizing them.

I met Summer in the MP motor pool. She was bright and full of energy but we didn't talk. There was nothing to say, except that the task we had set for ourselves was impossible. And I guessed neither of us wanted to confirm that out loud. So we didn't speak. We just picked a Humvee at random and headed out. I drove, for a change, the same three-minute journey I had driven thirty-some hours before.

got up and disappeared in the dark, there one minute, gone the next, like on the apartment balcony in Paris. Nice and I squatted side by side, with our backs against the wall. I said, "This is the scene where I try to get rid of you." She didn't answer.

Chester Stone said nothing. Just stood up and threaded his way by all the furniture and over to the door. Through the reception area and into the corridor and into the elevator. Down eighty-eight floors and back outside, where the bright morning sun hit him in the face like a blow.

he could hear faint sounds from their

Reacher said nothing in reply to that. Feral, from the Latin adjective ferus, wild, via bestia fera, wild animal. Generally held to mean having escaped from domestication, and having devolved back to a natural state.

the loud diesel roaring died into the mountain silence.

She moved silently over the thick corridor carpet. The hinge side of the door was closest, and the knob side farthest. She ducked under the peephole's field of view and flattened against the wall beyond the door. She reached out and tried the knob backhand. Long training. Always safer. Guns can shoot through doors. She

Afterward Reacher conceded that if a guy his own age had said it, he would have hit him right away, bang, before the last word had even died away to silence, because why let a guy who wants to start a fight do so on his own schedule? But this was a kid, and compassion demanded at least one do-over.

empty place opposite with eyes too

He hung up the phone and stood in the silence. He could hear Griezman's Mercedes behind him, idling at the curb. He could hear a faint penumbra of noise from the city, a mile away, and a ship's horn far down the river. Closer by he could hear a compressor running somewhere. Maybe someone was spraying paint. There were occasional engine noises, in the middle distance, as if things were being hauled back and forth. Not

outside the door. He breathed in, and he breathed

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.

They were in flat empty country and she eased the silent car faster down a dead-straight road. The hot sky was tinted bottle-green by the windshield.

Reacher kept quiet. He could see where this game was going. If he said yes, he'd be expected to hurt the guy badly. Which he had no objection to in principle, but he'd prefer to do it on his own terms. If he said no, Borken would call him a coward with no sense of natural justice and no self-respect. An obvious game, with no way to win. So he kept quiet, which was a tactic he'd used a thousand times before: when in doubt, just keep your mouth shut.

He knocked on the door and waited. He counted the seconds in his head. He had knocked on a lot of doors. He knew how it worked. One, they hear the knock, two, they get up off the couch, three, they thread around the clutter, four, they step to the door, five, they open it. The door opened. A guy stood there. On his own, with silence behind him. The

Was it you with Merchenko?" "Admit nothing, even on your deathbed. You might suddenly get better.