“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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“We’re loyal servants of the U.S. government. But Afghanistan involves fighting behind enemy lines. Never mind we were invited into a democratic country by its own government. Never mind there’s no shooting across the border in Pakistan, the illegality of the Taliban army, the Geneva Convention, yada, yada, yada. When we’re patrolling those mountains, trying everything we know to stop the Taliban regrouping, striving to find and arrest the top commanders and explosive experts, we are always surrounded by a well-armed, hostile enemy whose avowed intention is to kill us all. That’s behind enemy lines. Trust me. And we’ll go there. All day. Every day. We’ll do what we’re supposed to do, to the letter, or die in the attempt. On behalf of the U.S.A. But don’t tell us who we can attack. That ought to be up to us, the military. And if the liberal media and political community cannot accept that sometimes the wrong people get killed in war, then I can only suggest they first grow up and then serve a short stint up in the Hindu Kush. They probably would not survive. The truth is, any government that thinks war is somehow fair and subject to rules like a baseball game probably should not get into one. Because nothing’s fair in war, and occasionally the wrong people do get killed. It’s been happening for about a million years. Faced with the murderous cutthroats of the Taliban, we are not fighting under the rules of Geneva IV Article 4. We are fighting under the rules of Article 223.556mm — that’s the caliber and bullet gauge of our M4 rifle. And if those numbers don’t look good, try Article .762mm, that’s what the stolen Russian Kalashnikovs fire at us, usually in deadly, heavy volleys. In the global war on terror, we have rules, and our opponents use them against us. We try to be reasonable; they will stop at nothing. They will stoop to any form of base warfare: torture, beheading, mutilation. Attacks on innocent civilians, women and children, car bombs, suicide bombers, anything the hell they can think of. They’re right up there with the monsters of history.”
― Marcus Luttrell, quote from Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10
“most of my wandering in the desert i've done alone. not so much from choice as from necessity - i generally prefer to go into places where no one else wants to go. i find that in contemplating the natural world my pleasure is greater if there are not too many others contemplating it with me, at the same time.”
― Edward Abbey, quote from Desert Solitaire
“Ah, bella damigella, dignità, virtù e valore non sono riposti solo nell'abbigliamento!" esclamò Balin. "La virilità e l'onore sono celati nella persona, e vi sono molti insigni cavalieri ignoti a tutti, a riprova che il pregio e l'ardimento non hanno alcun rapporto con le vesti che indossano.”
― quote from Le Morte d'Arthur: King Arthur and the Legends of the Round Table
“She couldn't help thinking, even now about how handsome Damon looked, how wild and dark and ferocious and gorgeous. She could help thinking about the times he'd smiled at her, laughed at her, come to save her at her urgent call. She had honestly thought that someday... But now she felt as if her heart were breaking in two.”
― L.J. Smith, quote from Midnight
“...with Occam's old razor she could slit the throat of that idea.”
― John Crowley, quote from Little, Big
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Time RegainedBookQuoters 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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