Lee Child > Quotes

“Don't get it right - get it WRITTEN!”
― Lee Child

“Reacher said, "So here's the thing Brett. Either you take your hand off my chest, or I'll take it off your wrist.”
― Lee Child, Worth Dying For

“Never forgive, never forget. Do it once and do it right. You reap what you sow. Plans go to hell as soon as the first shot is fired. Protect and serve. Never off duty.”
― Lee Child, 61 Hours

“I'm not afraid of death. Death's afraid of me.”
― Lee Child, 61 Hours

“You do not mess with the special investigators.”
― Lee Child, Bad Luck And Trouble

“I'm a rich man. To have everything you need is the definition of affluence.”
― Lee Child, Gone Tomorrow

“No, I'm a man with a rule. People leave me alone, I leave them alone. If they don't, I don't.”
― Lee Child, Nothing to Lose

“Hope for the best, plan for the worst.”
― Lee Child

“To fill a small bag means selecting,and choosing, and evaluating. There's no logicial end to that process. Pretty soon I would have a big bag, and then two or three. A month later I'd be like the rest of you.”
― Lee Child, 61 Hours

“I was in the machine. My whole life. Then the machine coughed and spat me out. So I thought, OK, if I'm out, I'm out. All the way out. I was a little angry and it was probably an immature reaction. But I got used to it.”
― Lee Child, One Shot

“he was keeping track of time. It was nearly two hours since he had last looked at his watch, but he knew what time it was to within about twenty seconds. It was an old skill, born of many long wakeful nights on active service. When you're waiting for something to happen, you close your body down like a beach house in winter and you let your mind lock onto the steady pace of the passing seconds. It's like suspended animation. It saves energy and it lifts the responsibility for your heartbeat away from your unconscious brain and passes it on to some kind of a hidden clock. Makes a huge black space for thinking in. But it keeps you just awake enough to be reach for whatever you need to be ready for. And it means you always know what time it is.”
― Lee Child, Die Trying

“I know I'm smarter than an armadillo”
― Lee Child, Echo Burning

“I have to warn you. I promised my mother, a long time ago. She said I had to give folks a chance to walk away.”
― Lee Child, Nothing to Lose

“A person less fortunate than yourself deserves the best you can give. Because of duty, and honor, and service. You understand those words? You should do your job right, and you should do it well, simply because you can, without looking for notice or reward.”
― Lee Child, Nothing to Lose

“People, Reacher was certain about. Dogs were different. People had freedom of choice. If a man or a woman ran snarling toward him, they did so because they chose to. They were asking for whatever they got. His response was their problem. But dogs were different. No free will. Easily misled. It raised an ethical problem. Shooting a dog because it had been induced to do something unwise was not the sort of thing Reacher wanted to do.”
― Lee Child, Die Trying

“I'm not a vagrant. I'm a hobo. Big difference.”
― Lee Child, Killing Floor

“Now they broke my toothbrush, I don't own anything.”
― Lee Child, Bad Luck And Trouble

“Enough, a person might say, if that person lived in the civilized world, the world of movies and television and fair play and decent restraint. But Reacher didn’t live there. He lived in a world where you don’t start fights but you sure as hell finish them, and you don’t lose them either, and he was the inheritor of generations of hard-won wisdom that said the best way to lose them was to assume they were over when they weren’t yet.”
― Lee Child, Worth Dying For

“Slippery slope. I carry a spare shirt, pretty soon I'm carrying spare pants. Then I'd need a suitcase. Next thing I know, I've got a house and a car and a savings plan and I'm filling out all kinds of forms.”
― Lee Child, Bad Luck And Trouble

“Never forget a Favor, Never forgive a Slight!”
― Lee Child

“They found out about him in July and stayed angry all through August. They tried to kill him in September. It was way too soon. They weren't ready. The attempt was a failure. It could have been a disaster, but it was actually a miracle. Because nobody noticed.”
― Lee Child, Without Fail

“He picked up the wrench and broke the guy’s wrist with it, one, and then the other wrist, two, and turned back and did the same to the guy who had held the hammer, three, four. The two men were somebody’s weapons, consciously deployed, and no soldier left an enemy’s abandoned ordnance on the field in working order.

The doctor’s wife was watching from the cabin door, all kinds of terror in her face.

"What?" Reacher asked her.”
― Lee Child, Worth Dying For

“I had a teacher once, grade school somewhere. Philippines, I think, because she always wore a big white hat. So it was somewhere hot. I was always twice the size of the other kids, and she used to say to me: count to ten before you get mad, Reacher. And I've counted way past ten on this one. Way past.”
― Lee Child, Die Trying

“Lone women shouldn't stop in the middle of nowhere for giant unkempt strangers with duct tape on their faces.”
― Lee Child, Worth Dying For

“I went to college. West Point is technically a college.”
― Lee Child, One Shot

“This was like July 13th, 1943, the pivotal day of the Battle of the Kursk. We were like Alexander Vasilevsky, the Soviet general. If we attacked now, this minute, we had to keep on and on attacking until the enemy was run off his feet and the war was won. If we bogged down or paused for breath even for a second, we would be overrun again.”
― Lee Child, The Enemy

“The best fights are the ones you don't have", a wise man once said to me.”
― Lee Child, The Affair

“He had fallen out of the ugly tree, and hit every branch.”
― Lee Child, The Affair

“Don't be sad that roses have thorns.
Be glad that thorns have Roses.


Today's the day I worried about yesterday and it didn't happen.”
― Lee Child

“The third guy was different. He was what you got when you ate squirrels for four generations. Smarter than a rat and tougher than a goat, and jumpier than either one.”
― Lee Child, The Affair

“Reacher said Nothing”
― Lee Child

“I'm twenty-nine, yes really, I'm from Aspen, Colorado, I'm six feet one, yes really, I've been at Quantico two years, yes I date guys, no I dress like this just because I like it, no I'm not married, no I don't currently have a boyfriend, and no I don't want to have dinner with you tonight.”
― Lee Child, Running Blind

“Do you see anything Wrong with my teeth?"
"Plenty, I'm surprised you can eat. Maybe that's why your're so little”
― Lee Child, The Hard Way

“He looked at the pain and he set himself apart from it. He saw it, examined it, identified it, corralled it. He isolated it. He challenged it. You against me? Dream on, pal. He built borders for it. Then walls. He built walls and forced the pain behind them and then he moved the walls inward, compressing the pain, crushing it, boxing it in, limiting it, beating it.”
― Lee Child, Worth Dying For

“were under the very erroneous impression that we had money. Of”
― Lee Child, First Thrills: High-Octane Stories from the Hottest Thriller Authors

“veterans and remarkable rookies. International Thriller Writers, Inc. (ITW) cofounder, David”
― Lee Child, First Thrills: High-Octane Stories from the Hottest Thriller Authors

“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.”
― Lee Child, Die Trying

“The first day of the rest of my life.”
― Lee Child, The Affair