Quotes from Nothing to Lose

Lee Child ·  416 pages

Rating: (41.5K votes)


“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


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About the author

Lee Child
Born place: The United Kingdom
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Popular quotes

“The Writer's Oath

I promise solemnly:

1. to write as often and as much as I can,

2. to respect my writing self, and

3. to nurture the writing of others.

I accept these responsibilities and shall honor them always.”
― Gail Carson Levine, quote from Writing Magic: Creating Stories that Fly


“«El que algo sea una realidad 'física' no es el único criterio de verdad. También existen verdades 'anímicas', las cuales no pueden ni probarse ni explicarse, pero tampoco negarse físicamente. [...] Los milagros son únicamente una apelación al entendimiento de aquellos hombres que no son capaces de entender el 'sentido'; los milagros son en realidad un simple sustituto de la realidad no comprendida del 'espíritu'.»”
― C.G. Jung, quote from Answer to Job


“But the manner of giving voice to thoughts and feelings becomes particularly significant in the case of negative feelings or doubts about a relationship. The difference was highlighted for me when a fifty-year-old divorced man told me about his experiences in forming new relationships with women. On this matter, he was clear: "I do not value my fleeting thoughts, and I do not value the fleeting thoughts of others." He felt that the relationship he was currently in had been endangered, even permanently weakened, by the woman's practice of tossing out her passing thoughts, because, early in their courtship, many of her thoughts were fears about the relationship. Not surprisingly, since they did not yet know each other well, she worried about whether she could trust him, whether their relationship would destroy her independence, whether this relationship was really right for her. He felt she should have kept these fears and doubts to herself and waited to see how things turned out.
As it happens, things turned out well. The woman decided that the relationship was right for her, she could trust him, and she did not have to give up her independence. But he felt, at the time that he told me of this, that he had still not recovered from the wear and tear of coping with her earlier doubts. As he put it, he was still dizzy from having been bounced around like a yo-yo tied to the string of her stream of consciousness.
In contrast, the man admitted, he himself goes to the other extreme: he never expresses his fears or misgivings about their relationship at all. If he's unhappy but doesn't say anything about it, his unhappiness expresses itself in a kind of distancing coldness. This response is just what women fear most, and just the reason they prefer to express dissatisfactions and doubts - as an antidote to the isolation and distance that would result from keeping them to themselves.
The different perspectives on expressing or concealing dissatisfactions and doubts may reflect a difference in men's and women's awareness of the power of their words to affect others. In repeatedly telling him what she feared about their relationship, she spoke as though she assumed he was invulnerable and could not be hurt by what she said; perhaps she was underestimating the power of her words to affect him. For his part, when he refrains from expressing negative thoughts or feelings, he seems to be overestimating the power of his words to hurt her, when, ironically, she is more likely to be hurt by his silence than his words.
Such impasses will perhaps never be settled to the complete satisfaction of both parties, but understanding the differing views can help detoxify the situation, and both can make adjustments.”
― Deborah Tannen, quote from You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation


“Let no one think of me that I am humble or weak or passive; let them understand I am of a different kind: dangerous to my enemies, loyal to my friends. To such a life glory belongs.”
― Euripides, quote from Medea and Other Plays


“Mace-Let's get something straight right now woman...we are a couple.

Dez-I never agreed to that!

Mace- Don't care!”
― quote from The Mane Event


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