Quotes from The Enemy

“Everybody has a choice in life.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Enemy

“This was like July 13th, 1943, the pivotal day of the Battle of the Kursk. We were like Alexander Vasilevsky, the Soviet general. If we attacked now, this minute, we had to keep on and on attacking until the enemy was run off his feet and the war was won. If we bogged down or paused for breath even for a second, we would be overrun again.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Enemy

“The Reacher brothers' need for caffeine makes heroin addiction look like an amusing little take-it-or-leave-it sideline.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Enemy

“We’ve already got gays in the military. We always have had. World War Two, the Western Allies had fourteen million men in uniform. Any kind of reasonable probability says at least a million of them were gay. And we won that war, as I recall, last time I checked with the history books. We won it big time.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Enemy

“Civilian notions about unreasonable search and seizure and warrants and probable cause stop at an army post main gate.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Enemy

“She closed her eyes and opened them a moment later, like she was erasing the conversation from her memory.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Enemy

“Don’t go anywhere, don’t do anything, don’t call anyone. I guessed talking with the guy would amount to doing something, which would contravene the don’t do anything part of the command. But then, breathing was doing something, technically. So was metabolizing. My hair was growing, my beard was growing, all twenty of my nails were growing, I was losing weight. It was impossible not to do anything. So I decided that component of the order was purely rhetorical.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Enemy

“The Humvee came to a stop right in front of me and I tracked around to the driver’s window. Summer took up station on the passenger side, standing easy. The driver rolled his glass down. Stared out at me. “I’m looking for Major Marshall,” I said. The driver was a captain and his passenger was a captain too. They were both dressed in Nomex tank suits, with balaclavas and Kevlar helmets with built-in headphones. The passenger had sleeve pockets full of pens. He had clipboards strapped to both thighs. They were all covered with notes. Some kind of score sheets. “Marshall’s not here,” the driver said. “So where is he?” “Who’s asking?” “You can read,” I said. I was wearing last night’s BDUs. They had oak leaves on the collar and Reacher on the stencil.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Enemy

“I took my right hand off the wheel and reverse-punched him square between the eyes. It was a good solid smack. It put him right back to sleep. Manual anesthetic. He stayed out all the way back to the post.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Enemy

“We crossed the Avenue Bosquet against the light and then we made an arbitrary left into the Rue Jean Nicot. Joe stopped at a tabac and bought cigarettes. I would have smiled if I had been able to. The street was named after the guy who discovered nicotine.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Enemy

“Life,” Joe said. “What a completely weird thing it is. A person lives sixty years, does all kinds of things, knows all kinds of things, feels all kinds of things, and then it’s over. Like it never happened at all.” “We’ll always remember her.” “No, we’ll remember parts of her. The parts she chose to share. The tip of the iceberg. The rest, only she knew about. Therefore the rest already doesn’t exist. As of now.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Enemy

“Joe was probably the only other human on the planet who liked coffee as much as I did. He started drinking it when he was six. I copied him immediately. I was four. Neither of us has stopped since. The Reacher brothers’ need for caffeine makes heroin addiction look like an amusing little take-it-or-leave-it sideline.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Enemy

“I fed the phone again and dialed the Chief of Staff’s office, deep inside the Pentagon. A woman’s voice answered. It was a perfect Washington voice. Not high, not low, cultured, elegant, nearly accentless.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Enemy

“They were all in line, single file, like an armada from hell. It was a magnificent sight.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Enemy

“It was a fine gun, but an unlucky one. Steyr-Daimler-Puch built it with the prospect of big orders from the Austrian Army dancing in its eyes, but a rival outfit named Glock came along and stole the prize. Which left the GB an unhappy orphan, like Cinderella. And like Cinderella it had many excellent qualities. It packed eighteen rounds, which was a lot, but it weighed less than two and a half pounds unloaded, which wasn’t. You could take it apart and put it back together in twelve seconds, which was fast. Best of all, it had a very smart gas management system. All automatic weapons work by using the explosion of gas in the chamber to cycle the action, to get the spent case out and the next cartridge in. But in the real world some cartridges are old or weak or badly assembled. They don’t all explode with the same force. Put an out-of-spec weak load in some guns, and the action just wheezes and won’t cycle at all. Put a too-heavy load in, and the gun can blow up in your hand. But the Steyr was designed to deal with anything that came its way. If I were a Special Forces soldier taking dubious-quality ammunition from whatever ragtag bunch of partisans I was hanging with, I’d use a Steyr. I would want to be sure that whatever I was depending on would fire, ten times out of ten. Through”
― Lee Child, quote from The Enemy

“I applied what the unofficial Humvee manual called 2-40 air-conditioning, which meant you opened two windows and drove at forty miles an hour.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Enemy

“Then we could collate all the possibles and go to work with the holy trinity of detectives everywhere: means, motive, opportunity. Means and opportunity wouldn’t signify much. By definition nobody would be on the possibles list unless they had been proved to have opportunity. And everybody in the army was physically capable of swinging a tire iron or a crowbar against the back of an unsuspecting victim’s head. It was probably a rough equivalent of the most basic entry requirement.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Enemy

“He was listed as right-handed. The army needed to know that because bolt-action sniper rifles are made for right-handers. Left-handed soldiers don’t usually get assigned as snipers. Pigeonholing starts on day one in the military.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Enemy

“I know,” I said. “You already don’t respect me because you saw me naked.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Enemy

“I felt like a man who wakes alone on a deserted island to find that the rest of the world has stolen away in boats in the night. I felt like I was standing on a shore, watching small receding shapes on the horizon. I felt like I had been speaking English, and now I realized everyone else had been speaking a different language entirely. The world was changing. And I didn’t want it to.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Enemy

“The first sheet was an analysis of the problems that Armored was facing. The integrated units, the loss of prestige. The possibility of ceding command to others. It was gloomy, but it was conventional. And it was accurate, according to the Chief of Staff.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Enemy

“The hardcover book was an academic monograph from a Midwestern university about the Battle of Kursk. Kursk happened in July of 1943. It was Nazi Germany’s last grand offensive of World War Two and its first major defeat on an open battlefield. It turned into the greatest tank battle the world has ever seen, and ever will see, unless people like Kramer himself are eventually turned loose.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Enemy

“Just bought a vintage Pontiac GTO,” he said. “Fine car. I put polished headers on it, big bore pipes. Goes like shit off a shiny shovel.” I said nothing. “You like muscle cars?” “No,” I said. “I like to take the bus.” “That’s not much fun.” “OK, let me put it another way. I’m happy with the size of my penis. I don’t need compensation.” He”
― Lee Child, quote from The Enemy

“So my eyes spotted it and my brain processed it and rejected it instantly, on a purely preprogrammed basis. And then it hung up on it. Out of pure animal instinct. Because it looked like a snake. The lizard part of my brain whispered snake and I got that little primeval jolt of fright that had kept my ancestors alive and well way back in evolution. It was all over in a split second. It was smothered immediately. The modern educated part of my mind stepped in and said, No snakes here in January, bud. Way too cold. I breathed out and moved on a step and then paused to look back, purely out of curiosity.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Enemy

“The M1A1 Abrams is like a shark, evolved to a point of absolute perfection. It is the undisputed king of the jungle. No other tank on earth can even begin to damage it. It is wrapped in armor made out of a depleted uranium core sandwiched between rolled steel plate. The armor is dense and impregnable.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Enemy

“helicopters? The gunships? Always beating that particular drum?” “Was?” I said. “He died the day before New Year’s Eve. Car versus pedestrian in Heidelberg, Germany. Hit-and-run.” I clicked the phone off. “Swan mentioned that,” I said. “In passing. Now that I think about it.” “The check mark,” Summer said. I nodded. “One down, seventeen to go.” “What does T.E.P. mean?” “It’s old CIA jargon,” I said. “It means terminate with extreme prejudice.” She said nothing. “In other words, assassinate,” I said. We sat quiet for a long, long time. I looked at the ridiculous quotations again. The enemy. When your back is to the wall. The”
― Lee Child, quote from The Enemy

“What do you think?” Summer said. “I think they’re full of shit,” I said. “Important shit or regular flag-rank shit?” “They’re lying,” I said. “They’re uptight, they’re lying, and they’re stupid. Why am I worried about Kramer’s briefcase?” “Sensitive paperwork,” she said. “Whatever he was carrying to California.” I nodded. “They just defined it for me. It’s the conference agenda itself.” “You’re sure there was one?” “There’s always an agenda. And it’s always on paper. There’s a paper agenda for everything. You want to change the dog food in the K-9 kennels, you need forty-seven separate meetings with forty-seven separate paper agendas. So there was one for Irwin, that’s for damn sure. It was completely stupid to say there wasn’t. If they’ve got something to hide, they should have just said it’s too secret for me to see.” “Maybe the conference really wasn’t important.” “That’s bullshit too. It was very important.” “Why?” “Because a two-star general was going. And a one-star. And because it was New Year’s Eve, Summer. Who flies on New Year’s Eve and spends the night in a lousy stopover hotel? And this year in Germany was a big deal. The Wall is coming down. We won, after forty-five years. The parties must have been incredible. Who would miss them for something unimportant? To have gotten those three guys on a plane on New Year’s Eve, this Irwin thing had to be some kind of a very big deal.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Enemy

“We protect the army, Summer,” I said. “Like family. That’s what we’re for.” Then I paused. “But did you notice they didn’t shut up after that? They should have taken the hint. Cover-up requested, cover-up promised. Asked and answered, mission accomplished.” “They wanted to know where his stuff was.” “Yes,” I said. “They did. And you know what that means? It means they’re looking for Kramer’s briefcase too. Because of the agenda. Kramer’s copy is the only one still outside of their direct control. They came down here to check if I had it.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Enemy

“They’re scientists at heart, and scientists generally retain a good-faith interest in facts and the truth. Or at least they retain some kind of innate curiosity. All of which was good, because this guy’s attitude was going to be crucial. He could stay out of our way, or he could sell us out with a single phone call.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Enemy

“The doctor smiled briefly and balanced the bar across his palms again. “It’s handsome, in its way,” he said. “Does that sound strange?” I knew what he meant. It was a nice piece of steel, and it was everything it needed to be and nothing it didn’t. Like a Colt Detective Special, or a K-bar, or a cockroach.”
― Lee Child, quote from The Enemy

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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.