463 Quotes by Lee Child

Ninety percent of asking questions is about listening to answers.

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.

No, I’m a man with a rule. People leave me alone, I leave them alone. If they don’t, I don’t.

She said, “You say no one ever is sure what to expect. On either side. Which is a good thing. It means the game goes to the fastest thinker. That’s all I need to be.” “Correct,” I said. “Weird things are going to happen, and things are going to change, and the ground is going to move under our feet, but if we keep on thinking fast, we’ll be OK.

It helped a lonely man feel connected and isolated both at the same time.

Then we could collate all the possibles and go to work with the holy trinity of detectives everywhere: means, motive, opportunity. Means and opportunity wouldn’t signify much. By definition nobody would be on the possibles list unless they had been proved to have opportunity. And everybody in the army was physically capable of swinging a tire iron or a crowbar against the back of an unsuspecting victim’s head. It was probably a rough equivalent of the most basic entry requirement.

His shoes were bench-made by a company called Cheaney, from Northampton in England. Smarter buys than Church’s, which were basically the same shoes but with a premium tag for the name. The style Reacher had chosen was called Tenterden, which was a brown semi-brogue made of heavy pebbled leather.

I’m not really into gourmet food; I’m the kind of guy who just stops by a place that looks good rather than heading for the restaurant of the moment.

They checked in and washed up and met in the restaurant for dinner. It was a pretty room, with plenty of crisp white linen. There were couples and foursomes in there. They were the only threesome. Trysts and deals were going on all around them. Westwood got the internet on his phone and said, “Forty thousand suicides every year in America. One every thirteen minutes. Statistically we’re more likely to kill ourselves than each other. Who knew?