463 Quotes by Lee Child

Below us the young guy was talking through the door seal again. His body language was placatory. He was squirming and patting the air and glancing hopefully toward the road. They’re coming, I promise. And then they came.

Try to look unimportant. They may be low on ammo.

Most actors are small, anyway – at least compared to me.

Socratic, they call it in college. All kinds of back and forth, designed to elicit truths implicitly known by all rational beings.

It had been everything he had dreamed it would be, multiplied by a million. She wasn’t a myth. She was a living breathing creature, hard and strong and sinewy and perfumed, warm and shy and giving.

I know now, like drumbeats. Portentous, and a little sinister, like tympani strikes at the start of a gloomy symphony. Shostakovich, maybe.

They taught me that inhibitions would kill me. Hit early, hit hard. Kill with the first blow. Get your retaliation in first. Cheat. The gentlemen who behaved decently weren’t there to train anybody. They were already dead.

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

He believed that anything could be reverse-engineered. If one human or group of humans put something together, then another human or group of humans could take it apart again. It was a basic principle. All that was required was empathy and thought and imagination. And he liked pressure. He liked deadlines. He liked a short and finite time to crack a problem. He liked a quiet space to work in. And he liked a similar mind to work with.