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.
You tell a lot of lies, Ms. Berenson,” he said. Berenson said nothing. Neagley said, “She’s Human Resources. It’s what they do.
Waiting is a skill like anything else.
Never revive a guy who had just pulled a gun on you.
Reacher said nothing. We can’t fight thirty people. To which Reacher’s natural response was: Why the hell not?
People live, and then they die. And as long as they do both things properly, there’s nothing much to regret”.
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.
Ninety percent of asking questions is about listening to answers.
I felt like someone else. I felt like a normal person. But I got over it.
Facts were to be faced, not fought.
Canada’s army is three men and a dog. They probably keep their stuff forever.
A person either runs or he fights. It’s a binary choice, and I’m a fighter.
You need infinite patience. No use fretting or worrying. You just wait. Doing nothing, thinking nothing, burning no energy. Then you burst into action. After an hour, five hours, a day, a week. Waiting is a skill like anything else.
Either way Reacher figured he might as well find out. He had no place to go, and all the time in the world to get there, so detours cost him nothing.
But we’re all still KGB really. Old wine, new bottles.
A lesson learned long ago: the human brain was much more sensitive to side-to-side displacement than front-to-back. An evolutionary quirk, presumably, like most things.
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.
Now you had one come back, Harley.
He believed that anything could be reverse-engineered. If one human or group of humans put something together, then another human or group of humans could take it apart again. It was a basic principle. All that was required was empathy and thought and imagination. And he liked pressure. He liked deadlines. He liked a short and finite time to crack a problem. He liked a quiet space to work in. And he liked a similar mind to work with.
Forty thousand suicides every year in America. One every thirteen minutes. Statistically we’re more likely to kill ourselves than each other.