463 Quotes by Lee Child

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.

I had been coming to America very frequently for many, many years, so I had plenty of exposure – and maybe the best kind of exposure, because I think first impressions are very important. Maybe I notice stuff that is just subliminal to people who live here all the time.

Reacher prowled the hallway, his gun stiff-armed way out in front of him, his torso jerking violently left and right from the hips, like a crazy disco dance. The house-storming shuffle.

Lowell’s an odd duck,” Peterson said. “He’s a loner. He reads books.

She had used a simile, to explain and flatter and apologize all at once. She had written, “You’re like New York City. I love to visit, but I could never live there.

I don’t need validation, recognition or praise. What I need are facts and the facts are that one of my books gets sold, somewhere in the world, every second.

It’s a kind of zen question: if you write a book and no one reads it, is it really a book?

Reacher fired. Single shot. Range, eighty feet. Nine-millimeter Parabellum, 124 grains, full metal jacket. Muzzle velocity, more than eight hundred miles an hour. Time to target, less than a fifteenth of a second. Virtually instantaneous.

I want you to swallow your tongue. I want you to just gulp it down, real sudden, like it was an oyster.