A calm environment is for after I finish work.
I have three desks. One empty for paperwork, one for the internet and email, and one for the writing computer.
I know I’m smarter than an armadillo.
I’m not a vagrant. I’m a hobo. Big difference.
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.
He had fallen out of the ugly tree, and hit every branch.
I’m twenty-nine, yes really, I’m from Aspen, Colorado, I’m six feet one, yes really, I’ve been at Quantico two years, yes I date guys, no I dress like this just because I like it, no I’m not married, no I don’t currently have a boyfriend, and no I don’t want to have dinner with you tonight.
Never forget a Favor, Never forgive a Slight!
Lone women shouldn’t stop in the middle of nowhere for giant unkempt strangers with duct tape on their faces.
Now they broke my toothbrush, I don’t own anything.
Slippery slope. I carry a spare shirt, pretty soon I’m carrying spare pants. Then I’d need a suitcase. Next thing I know, I’ve got a house and a car and a savings plan and I’m filling out all kinds of forms.
I went to college. West Point is technically a college.
No, I’m a man with a rule. People leave me alone, I leave them alone. If they don’t, I don’t.
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.
I like food, like any other guy, but it is not the main thing in my life. I can do without it.
Enough, a person might say, if that person lived in the civilized world, the world of movies and television and fair play and decent restraint. But Reacher didn’t live there. He lived in a world where you don’t start fights but you sure as hell finish them, and you don’t lose them either, and he was the inheritor of generations of hard-won wisdom that said the best way to lose them was to assume they were over when they weren’t yet.
Do it once and do it right and do it quickly.
We both sat there mute, as if we were in a no-talking competition and serious about winning.
He looked at the pain and he set himself apart from it. He saw it, examined it, identified it, corralled it. He isolated it. He challenged it. You against me? Dream on, pal. He built borders for it. Then walls. He built walls and forced the pain behind them and then he moved the walls inward, compressing the pain, crushing it, boxing it in, limiting it, beating it.
No one talked, but they all said plenty.