“I don't want to put the world to rights... I just don't like people who put the world to wrongs.”
― Lee Child, quote from 61 Hours
“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, quote from 61 Hours
“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, quote from 61 Hours
“Anecdotally his fitness reports rated him well above average in the classroom, excellent in the field, fluently bilingual in English and French, passable in Spanish, outstanding on all man-portable weaponry, and beyond outstanding at hand-to-hand combat. Susan knew what that last rating meant. Like having a running chainsaw thrown at you”
― Lee Child, quote from 61 Hours
“One day it seemed like a good idea, the next day it didn’t. That kind of thing happened all the time, way back when, because strategy was fluid. Or because nobody had the faintest idea what they were doing.”
― Lee Child, quote from 61 Hours
“He had no bag, which was strange. But overall it was vaguely reassuring to have such a man on board, especially after he had proved himself civilized and not in any way threatening. Threatening behavior from a man that size would have been unseemly. Good manners from a man that size were charming.”
― Lee Child, quote from 61 Hours
“He went with olive green, because it almost matched his borrowed coat, which was tan. He chose pants with flannel lining, a T-shirt a flannel shirt, and a sweater made of thick cotton. He added white underwear and a pair of black gloves and a khaki watch cap. Total damage was a hundred and thirty bucks. The store owner took a hundred and twenty cash. Four days wear, probably, at the rate of thirty dollars a day. Which added up to more than ten grand a year, just for clothes. Insane, some would say. But Reacher liked the deal. He knew that most folks spent much less than ten grand a year on clothes. They had a small number of good items that they kept in closets and laundered in basements. But the closets and basements were surrounded by houses, and houses cost a whole lot more than ten grand a year, to buy or rent, and to maintain and repair and insure.
So who was really nuts ?”
― Lee Child, quote from 61 Hours
“OK,” Reacher said. “It wasn’t a colonel. It was a one-star general.”
― Lee Child, quote from 61 Hours
“Holland asked, ‘You want to explain why I had to call for two ambulances?’
Reacher said, ‘Because I slipped.’
‘What?’
‘On the ice.’
‘That’s your story? You slipped and just kind of blundered into them?’
‘No, I slipped when I was hitting the big guy. It softened the blow. If I hadn’t slipped you wouldn’t be calling for two ambulances. You’d be calling for one ambulance and one coroner’s wagon.”
― Lee Child, quote from 61 Hours
“once in a pocket, a solid mechanical thrill”
― Lee Child, quote from 61 Hours
“She has a caller ID system,” Reacher said. “With coordinates. She’s probably watching this house right now, on Google Earth.” “But it’s dark.” “Don’t ask me how it works.” He”
― Lee Child, quote from 61 Hours
“The gunsmoke whipped away in the wind and the sudden noise faded and the jet whine came back, low and steady.”
― Lee Child, quote from 61 Hours
“K-turned across the width of Janet Salter’s street. The”
― Lee Child, quote from 61 Hours
“In principle the most vulnerable, but he wasn’t worried. Sheer rage would overcome any theoretical tactical disadvantage.”
― Lee Child, quote from 61 Hours
“Stealthy approaches were hard to make through thigh-high drifts.”
― Lee Child, quote from 61 Hours
“Lowell’s an odd duck,” Peterson said. “He’s a loner. He reads books.”
― Lee Child, quote from 61 Hours
“Reacher nodded. “For a spell.” Then he said: “Plato is a weird name for a Mexican, don’t you think? Sounds more like a Brazilian name to me.” “No, Yugoslavian,” Peterson said. “Like that old dictator.” “That was Tito.” “I thought he was a South African bishop.” “That was Tutu.”
― Lee Child, quote from 61 Hours
“Looking at it how?” “On my laptop. With Google Earth.” “You guys have it easy.” “Technology is indeed a wonderful thing. How can I help you?”
― Lee Child, quote from 61 Hours
“She has a caller ID system,” Reacher said. “With coordinates. She’s probably watching this house right now, on Google Earth.”
― Lee Child, quote from 61 Hours
“He had many formal qualifications. He was rated expert on all small arms. He had won an inter-service thousand-yard rifle competition with a record score. Anecdotally his fitness reports rated him well above average in the classroom, excellent in the field, fluently bilingual in English and French, passable in Spanish, outstanding on all man-portable weaponry, and beyond outstanding at hand-to-hand combat. Susan knew what that last rating meant. Like having a running chain saw thrown at you.”
― Lee Child, quote from 61 Hours
“He was the youngest and newest member of a four-man team. Hence, low man on the totem pole. Except that calling a new guy the low man on the totem pole was completely ass-backward. Totem poles were what? Twenty, thirty feet high? Native Americans weren’t dumb. They put the most important guy at the bottom. At eye level. What important guy wanted to be twenty or thirty feet off the ground, where no one could see him? Like supermarkets. The eye-level shelf was reserved for the best stuff. The high-margin items. The big corporations hired experts to figure out stuff like that. Eye level was what it was all about. Thus the low man was really the high man, and the high man was really the low man. In a manner of speaking. A common misperception. A kind of linguistic inversion. Caleb Carter didn’t know how it had come about. Night watch was”
― Lee Child, quote from 61 Hours
“sat alone until Peterson stuck his head in the hallway and called for him. He took the borrowed Highway Patrol”
― Lee Child, quote from 61 Hours
“Infantry. That stuff matters over there.”
― Lee Child, quote from 61 Hours
“Five minutes to three in the afternoon. Exactly sixty-one hours before it happened. The lawyer drove in and parked in the empty lot. There was an inch of new snow on the ground, so he spent a minute fumbling in the foot well until his overshoes were secure. Then he got out and turned his collar up and walked to the visitors’ entrance. There was a bitter wind out of the north. It was thick with fat lazy flakes. There was a storm sixty miles away. The radio had been full of it. The”
― Lee Child, quote from 61 Hours
“everywhere was debris from the plane. No attempt was made to”
― Lee Child, quote from 61 Hours
“Gravity only, into the length of hose that lay on the floor at a lower level than the tank itself. For the rest, the pump would have to prime itself and then suck hard and haul it all up and out.”
― Lee Child, quote from 61 Hours
Lee Child
Born place: The United Kingdom
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“I don't know if you're alive or dead.
Can you on earth be sought,
or only when the sunsets fade
be mourned secretly in my thought?
All is for you: the daily prayer,
the sleepless heat at night,
and of my verses, the white
flock, and of my eyes, the blue fire.
No-one was more cherished, no-one tortured
me more, not
even the one who betrayed me to torture,
not even the one who caressed me and forgot.”
― Anna Akhmatova, quote from Selected Poems
“The scientist in me worries that my happiness is nothing more than a symptom of bipolar disease, hypergraphia from a postpartum disorder. The rest of me thinks that artificially splitting off the scientist in me from the writer in me is actually a kind of cultural bipolar disorder, one that too many of us have. The scientist asks how I can call my writing vocation and not addiction. I no longer see why I should have to make that distinction. I am addicted to breathing in the same way. I write because when I don’t, it is suffocating. I write because something much larger than myself comes into me that suffuses the page, the world, with meaning. Although I constantly fear that what I am writing teeters at the edge of being false, this force that drives me cannot be anything but real, or nothing will ever be real for me again.”
― quote from The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain
“Tom smiled and surrendered to the inevitable. Because you couldn’t escape your fucking past, so why bother trying?”
― S.E. Jakes, quote from Long Time Gone
“I really miss us, Trent.” I swallow. “I miss how I could tell you everything and how I knew you’d never judge me. I miss how safe I used to feel when you held me. I miss that you knew me better than I knew myself. I miss my best friend so much,” I add, as a tear rolls over my lashes. “What we did stole him from me. I want him back.”
― Lisa Desrochers, quote from A Little Too Far
“Running so hard, her breath stippled with pain to go faster, hit the grass harder, move forward faster, like she could break through something in front of her, something no one else saw.”
― Megan Abbott, quote from The End of Everything
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