Quotes from The Affair

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

“I said nothing. I’m good at saying nothing. I don’t like talking. I could go the rest of my life without saying another word, if I had to.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Affair

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

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Affair

“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, quote from The Affair

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

“No one expects a head butt. Humans don’t hit things with their heads. Some inbuilt atavistic instinct says so. A head butt changes the game. It adds a kind of unhinged savagery to the mix. An unprovoked head butt is like bringing a sawed-off shotgun to a knife fight.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Affair

“The best fights are the ones you don’t have,”
― Lee Child, quote from The Affair

“Sometimes if you want to know for sure whether the stove is hot, the only way to find out is to touch it.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Affair

“On his day of demobilization a lugubrious one-armed, one-eyed brigadier wished him well and then added, apropos of nothing, “Mark my words, Moutier, a great war leaves a country with three armies: an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Affair

“There are a lot of them, all around the wsorld, all built a lifetime ago, during the long and spectacular blaze of American military power and self-confidence, when there was nothing we couldn't or wouldn't do. I was a product of that era, but not a part of it. I was nostalgic for something I had never experienced.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Affair

“The Pentagon was built because World War Two was coming, and because World War Two was coming it was built without much steel. Steel was needed elsewhere, as always in wartime. Thus the giant building was a monument to the strength and mass of concrete. So much sand was needed for the mix it was dredged right out of the Potomac River, not far from the rising walls themselves. Nearly a million tons of it. The result was extreme solidity.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Affair

“Most right-handed people end up walking wide counterclockwise circles, because most right-handed people have left legs fractionally shorter than their right legs. Basic biology and geometry. I avoided that particular peril by stepping to the right of every tenth tree I came to, whether I thought I needed to or not.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Affair

“They all shared Stan’s personal allegiance to the famous old saying: War is not about dying for your country. It’s about making the other guy die for his.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Affair

“He said all that needs to happen for evil to prevail is that good men do nothing.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Affair

“You ever notice how the folks who talk loudest about small government always seem to live in the states with the biggest subsidies?”
― Lee Child, quote from The Affair

“Rule two: watch his eyes. If they stayed up, he was going to swing. If they dropped down, he was going to kick.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Affair

“No one expects a head butt. Humans don’t hit things with their heads. Some inbuilt atavistic instinct says so. A head butt changes the game. It adds a kind of unhinged savagery to the mix. An unprovoked head butt is like bringing a sawed-off shotgun to a knife fight. The guy went down like an empty suit.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Affair

“Realitatile sunt musafiri nepoftiti in lumea fanteziei.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Affair

“old enough to show some mileage, young enough to still find some amusement in the world.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Affair

“It would have been hard to be noisier, in fact, short of firing the Winchester a couple of times and singing the National Anthem.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Affair

“He also said the day we see the truth and cease to speak is the day we begin to die.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Affair

“Any day could be the last of life or liberty, so small pleasures were always worth pursuing.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Affair

“plant. She said, “OK, time out. Convince”
― Lee Child, quote from The Affair

“Then I sat in my chair”
― Lee Child, quote from The Affair

“Cand e vorba de sange, cu putin ajungi departe.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Affair

“You looked angry twenty minutes ago. With the McKinney family.” “That was just a technical problem. Space and time. I didn’t want to be late for dinner. I wasn’t angry, really. Well, not at first. I got a bit frustrated later. You know, mentally. I mean, when there were four of them, I gave them the chance to come back in numbers. And what did they do? They added two more guys. That’s all. They showed up with a total of six. What is that about? It’s deliberate disrespect.” Deveraux said, “I think most people would consider six against one to be fairly respectful.” “But I warned them. I told them they’d need more. I was trying to be fair. But they wouldn’t listen. It was like talking to the Pentagon.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Affair

“Both of them had noses like spoiled eggplants. Both of them had two black eyes. Both of them had crusted blood on their lips. Neither one of them”
― Lee Child, quote from The Affair

“impatient, reckless, careless, and full of entitlement.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Affair

About the author

Popular quotes

“I don’t know which is right!”
― quote from Little Pilgrim's Progress: From John Bunyan's Classic

“The words of mere men are as naught against the Word of God.”
― Gil Courtemanche, quote from A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali

“He is well satisfied with his accommodation, which provides all modern amenities in a compact and convenient form, and leaves him the maximum amount of time free for his work. How much time people waste in walking from one room to another.... Space is time.”
― David Lodge, quote from Small World

“We come into contact with people only with our exteriors—physically and externally; yet each of us walks about with a great wealth of interior life, a private and secret self. We are, in reality, somewhat split in two, the self and the body; the one hidden, the other open. The child learns very quickly to cultivate this private self
because it puts a barrier between him and the demands of the world. He learns he can keep secrets—at first an excruciating, intolerable burden: it seems that the outer world has every right to penetrate into his self and that the parents could automatically do so if they wished—they always seem to know just what he is thinking and feeling. But then he discovers that he can lie and not be found out: it is a
great and liberating moment, this anxious first lie—it represents the staking out of his claim to an integral inner self, free from the prying eyes of the world. By the time we grow up we become masters at dissimulation, at cultivating a self that the world cannot probe. But we pay a price. After years of turning people away,
of protecting our inner self, of cultivating it by living in a different world, of furnishing this world with our fantasies and dreams—we find that we are hopelessly separated from everyone else. We have become victims of our own art. We touch people on the outsides of their bodies, and they us, but we cannot get at their insides and cannot reveal our insides to them. This is one of the great tragedies of our interiority—it is utterly personal and unrevealable. Often we want to say something unusually intimate to a spouse, a parent, a friend, communicate
something of how we are really feeling about a sunset, who we really feel we are—only to fall strangely and miserably flat. Once in a great while we succeed, sometimes more with one person, less or never with others. But the occasional breakthrough only proves the rule. You reach out with a disclosure, fail, and fall back bitterly into yourself. We emit huge globs of love to our parents and spouses, and the glob slithers away in exchanges of words that are somehow beside the point of what we are trying to say. People seem to keep bumping up against each other with their exteriors and falling away from each other. The cartoonist Jules Feiffer is the modern master of this aspect of the human tragedy. Take even the sexual act—the most intimate merger given to organisms. For most people, even for their entire lives, it is simply a joining of exteriors. The insides melt only in the moment of orgasm, but even this is brief, and a melting is not a communication. It is a physical overcoming of separateness, not a symbolic revelation and justification of one’s interior. Many people pursue sex precisely because it is a mystique of the overcoming of the separateness of the inner world; and they go from one partner to another because they can never quite achieve “it.” So the endless interrogations: “What are you thinking about right now—me? Do you feel what I feel? Do you love me?”
― Ernest Becker, quote from The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man

“Believing isn’t wishing, Grady. What you know with your heart is the only thing you really ever know.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Breathless

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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.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.