463 Quotes by Lee Child

People who say “no” right away are usually lying. A truthful person is perfectly capable of saying “no” but generally they stop and think about it first. And they add “sorry” or something like that. Maybe they come out with some questions of their own. It’s human nature. They say, “Sorry, no, why, what happened?

All he could hear was a small voice inside his head that was saying you were wrong. Completely wrong. It was a voice he had heard before, but that didn’t make it any easier to hear again, because he had built his whole career on hearing it fewer times than the next guy. It was like a box score in his mind, and his average had just taken some serious damage. Which upset him. Not because of vanity. It upset him because he was a professional who was supposed to get things right.

Try Keever again. Just in case.” “I don’t want to. I don’t want to hear him not answer.” “He’s either OK or he isn’t. Calling him or not calling him doesn’t change anything.

Life is endlessly capable of surprises, so he knew one day he would come face to face with his physical equal. With somebody who might worry him. But he looked and saw this wasn’t the day. So he just smiled and looked away again.

He understood the theory. In an emergency people would have to exit that way, out through the window and over the wing. Hence all kinds of regulations mandated a minimum space, so people would be comfortable on their way through, except that if such a thing existed as a minimum space for a person to be comfortable, then why wasn’t every row just as capacious? It was a regulatory conundrum he couldn’t unravel.

Reacher hated turning back. He liked to press on, dead ahead, whatever.

I felt like a man who wakes alone on a deserted island to find that the rest of the world has stolen away in boats in the night. I felt like I was standing on a shore, watching small receding shapes on the horizon. I felt like I had been speaking English, and now I realized everyone else had been speaking a different language entirely. The world was changing. And I didn’t want it to.

The guy said, “Hop in the back.” He craned around in his seat and batted stray items aside. Reacher opened the door and slid in and used his hip to finish the job. He closed the door and the woman hit the gas and they took off, cruising easy through the last thirty-some miles of America.

Rule two: watch his eyes. If they stayed up, he was going to swing. If they dropped down, he was going to kick.