“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, quote from 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, quote from Nothing to Lose
“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, quote from Nothing to Lose
“Where are the deputies?'
'On their way up to the first-aid post.'
'What happened to them?'
'I did.”
― Lee Child, quote from Nothing to Lose
“That should be your town motto. It's all I ever hear. Like: New Hampshire, Live Free or Die. It should be: Despair, You Need To Leave Now.”
― Lee Child, quote from Nothing to Lose
“The guy who was standing said, “We don’t want you here.” Reacher said, “You’re confusing me with someone who gives a shit what you want.”
― Lee Child, quote from Nothing to Lose
“Some officers of his acquaintance had barked and yelled and shouted. He had always found it more effective to speak low and quiet, enunciating clearly and precisely as if to an idiot child, bearing down with an icy stare. That way he had found the implied menace to be unmistakable.”
― Lee Child, quote from Nothing to Lose
“Canada's army is three men and a dog. They probably keep their stuff forever.”
― Lee Child, quote from Nothing to Lose
“The line between Hope and Despair was exactly that: a line, in the road,”
― Lee Child, quote from Nothing to Lose
“and hot raw wood. There was a guy behind a counter, in worn blue overalls stained black with dirt. He was”
― Lee Child, quote from Nothing to Lose
“The only opponents Reacher truly feared were small whippy guys with fast hands and sharp blades.”
― Lee Child, quote from Nothing to Lose
“The best defense against knives was distance. The best countermove was entanglement.”
― Lee Child, quote from Nothing to Lose
“A crowd two hundred strong was the largest animal on the face of the earth. The heaviest, the hardest to control, the hardest to stop. The hardest to kill. Big targets, but after-action reports always showed that crowds took much less than one casualty per round fired.”
― Lee Child, quote from Nothing to Lose
“There was nothing in his pockets except paper money and an expired passport and an ATM card and a clip-together toothbrush.”
― Lee Child, quote from Nothing to Lose
“Reacher hated turning back. He liked to press on, dead ahead, whatever.”
― Lee Child, quote from Nothing to Lose
“There were pictures on the walls, all of them dime-store prints of Jesus. In all of them Jesus had blue eyes and wore pale blue robes and had long blond hair and a neat blond beard. He looked more like a Malibu surfer than a Jew from two thousand years ago.”
― Lee Child, quote from Nothing to Lose
“Psychologists figured that the memory center was located in the left brain, and the imagination engine in the right brain. Therefore people unconsciously glanced to the left when they were remembering things, and to the right when they were making stuff up. When”
― Lee Child, quote from Nothing to Lose
“Because deep down to the army a wounded soldier that can’t fight anymore is garbage. So we depend on civilians, and civilians don’t care either.”
― Lee Child, quote from Nothing to Lose
“We’re all atheists. You don’t believe in Zeus or Thor or Neptune or Augustus Caesar or Mars or Venus or Sun Ra. You reject a thousand gods. Why should it bother you if someone else rejects a thousand and one?”
― Lee Child, quote from Nothing to Lose
“There was a four-place table with only three chairs. There were what Reacher’s mother had called “touches.” Dried flowers, bottles of virgin olive oil that would never be used, antique spoons. Reacher’s mother had said such things gave a room personality. Reacher himself had been unsure how anything except a person could have personality. He had been a painfully literal child. But over the years he had come to see what his mother had meant. And Vaughan’s kitchen had personality.”
― Lee Child, quote from Nothing to Lose
“Inside was a ten-digit keypad. A combination lock. One through nine, plus zero, laid out like a telephone. A possible 3,628,800 variants. It”
― Lee Child, quote from Nothing to Lose
“He had seen the herd instinct at work, the anonymity, the removal of inhibition, the implied permissions of collective action. He had seen that an angry crowd was the most dangerous animal on the face of the earth.”
― Lee Child, quote from Nothing to Lose
“stopped. She looked at it like she was having second”
― Lee Child, quote from Nothing to Lose
“Zeno spoke Greek, not Latin, and preferred passive resignation to reckless optimism.”
― Lee Child, quote from Nothing to Lose
Lee Child
Born place: The United Kingdom
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“I did not buy a book called Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen Donaldson, which has the temerity to compare itself, on the front cover, to 'Tolkien at his best.' The back cover attributes the quote to the Washington Post, a newspaper whose quotations will always damn a book for me from now on. How dare they? And how dare the publishers? It isn't a comparison anyone could make, except to say 'Compared to Tolkien at his best, this is dross.' I mean you could say that even about really brilliant books like A Wizard of Earthsea. I expect Lord Foul's Bane (horrible title, sounds like a Conan book) is more like Tolkien at his worst, which would be the beginning of The Simarillion.
The thing about Tolkien, about The Lord of the Rings, is that it's perfect.”
― Jo Walton, quote from Among Others
“there are worse things than death or murder.” “Like what?” I asked. “Though it’s hard to comprehend,” he said, “the worst thing is to say to God that you don’t need him. Why? Because a dead person can be restored to life by God; a bereaved person can find peace from God; a person who has been violated can find God’s sustenance and strength and even see God conquer through the dark mystery of evil. In other words, there is recourse through these atrocities and tragedies. But to a person who says he or she doesn’t need God, what is the recourse? There is none.”
― Lee Strobel, quote from The Case for Faith: A Journalist Investigates the Toughest Objections to Christianity
“That perfected machines may one day succeed us is, I remember, an extremely commonplace notion on Earth. It prevails not only among poets and romantics but in all classes of society. Perhaps it is because it is so widespread, born spontaneously in popular imagination, that it irritates scientific minds. Perhaps it is also for this very reason that it contains a germ of truth. Only a germ: Machines will always be machines; the most perfected robot, always a robot. But what of living creatures possessing a certain degree of intelligence, like apes? And apes, precisely, are endowed with a keen sense of imitation.…”
― Pierre Boulle, quote from Planet of the Apes
“Magic is a matter of focusing the disciplined will. But sometimes the will must be abandoned. The secret lies in knowing when to exercise control, and when to let go.”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, quote from The King Stag
“I don’t like cops. I mean, it’s all well and good that they’re out there defending us against anarchy and all, but most of the cops I’ve met are suspicious of everything and everyone. Every little thing needs to have a motive behind it. As a rule I find them cynical and too analytical, very one-plus-one-equals-two types. There’s no way a cop would take me at my word. I mean, I could just see myself walking up to the police counter and saying, ‘Hey, I have some information about a murder. I’m a psychic, so please take me seriously.’ They’d laugh in my face as they locked me up in the looney bin.
And what if I was right? What if the information I had did help them? You can bet that instead of taking my gift seriously they’d think I had something to do with the crime. No, I don’t want any part of it. There’s no way I can prove how I got my information, and cops are big on proof. They’d want some evidence as to how I knew such and such. Well, in my profession, proof is a hard thing to come by. I live in an intangible world. I don’t know why I know things, I just do, and that doesn’t translate well in the world of your average lawman.”
― Victoria Laurie, quote from Abby Cooper, Psychic Eye
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Death Comes for the...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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