Running Blind Quotes
"People say that knowledge is power. The more knowledge, the more power."
"Suppose you knew the winning numbers for the lottery? All of them? Not guessed them, not dreamed them, but really knew them? What would you do?"
"You're talking about knowledge. Real, hard knowledge."
"Suppose you wanted to kill people. You would need to know ahead of time how to do it."
"The perfect method is not an easy method, and careful preparation is very important."
"Knowledge is full of decisions and judgments and guesses, and it gets to the point where you're so accustomed to making them you keep right on making them even when you don't strictly need to."
"The dynamics of the city. The strong terrorize the weak."
"People on city streets were fearful and furtive and defensive."
"For every city person he needed to be scared of there were nine hundred and ninety-nine others a lot more scared of him."
"The dynamics of the city. His mother had been scared of cities."
"Wouldn't you like to know what this is about?"
"OK," he said. "Pleased to meet you all. So what about those Yankees? You think they need to trade?"
"No, Ernesto A. Miranda is the best friend I got," Reacher said.
"I'm not saying anything. I've got nothing to say."
"You ever been to Israel? Women in the front line there too, and I wouldn't want to put too many U.S. units up against the Israeli defenses."
"The record will show you had your rights, any old time I say you had them."
"Black is all I got," he said. "No milk or sugar in the house, I'm afraid."
"Harassment complainant, won her case, but quit anyway."
"The harassment thing was two years ago, she quit a year ago. So that's three out of three. So the Army thing is not a coincidence, believe me."
"My opinion is it's a really stupid question. Like asking me if I thought a jockey could ride a horse."
"So you were a plausible suspect," Blake said. "As far as the first two went."
"Don't you feel anything?" Blake asked. "For these women getting killed? Shouldn't be happening, right?"
"We got your record. You were a hell of an investigator, in the service."
"Somebody's full of bullet holes, you conclude they've been shot to death. Somebody's got their head smashed in, you call it trauma with a blunt object."
"The nakedness is about humiliation, we think. Punishment. The whole thing was about punishment. Retribution, or something."
"Special Forces are interested in getting people dead, for sure, but they don't care about leaving anybody puzzled afterward about how they did it."
"The more they do, the more I feel really guilty for calling myself a Cinderella at the beginning."
"You want me to be honest with you? Not really, I guess. I just want you to help me out."
"Somebody close to you is in trouble, you want to take care of it yourself, right?"
"A soldier figuring to avoid physical violence is like a CPA figuring to avoid adding numbers."
"Better than talking in bullshit, like they do downstairs."
"No, not really. Pretty normal, wouldn't you say? For a soldier?"
"Hope for the best, plan for the worst. You know how it is."
"We're looking for a very, very, very clever guy."
"Don't open up to anybody, nothing can go wrong."
"He's in the hospital in Spokane. I go there every afternoon."
"Either you swallow it, or it goes public in a big way."
"I'm the living proof. I just went ballistic."
"It's a very weird soldier, that's for damn sure. Not like any I ever met."
"Nothing's ever wasted," Reacher said. "Negatives can be useful too."
"If they don't open the door for him, what's he going to do?"
"First, second, and third duty is protecting their own ass against cuts by proclaiming their successes and concealing their failures."
"That's how I'd do it," he said. "If I was real mad with somebody, that's what I'd do."
"I can't worry about something I can't change."
"We can all guess, as much as we want to. But we can't turn our backs on eighty women just because we enjoy guessing."
"Well, give it some more. Because the next woman to die will be one of the eleven I marked, and it'll be on your head."
"Life's a bitch, right? You get a hook into me, and suddenly the hook isn't there anymore. Fate's a funny thing, isn't it?"
"The drifter's life. Its charm was a big part of him, and he missed it when he was stuck in Garrison or holed up in the city with Jodie."
"Because I wanted to live in a world with rules. Civilized rules."
"A little psychology of your own? Trying to leave with a clear conscience?"
"You've got a lot of talent. Everything was backed up, double-safe, triple-safe."
"A big fish in a small pond has no place to swim."
"Stay-at-home hobbies," she said. "I'm either in this room or within sight of my front door. I don't get out much and I don't like meeting people."
"You should trust him," she said. "I still do, you know. Which is one hell of a recommendation, believe me."
"Because they just flew your sister's body in for the autopsy. And you can't be involved in that. I can't let you."
"At this point, the cause of death is all I want," Blake said.
"Meaning I'm not exactly filled with optimism," Stavely said. "I suspect if there was anything to find, you'd know about it by now. Good people, down there."
"Got to be something," Blake said. "He made a mistake this time, with the box."
"Well, don't hold your breath, is all I'm saying."
"Instant," he said. "Like Polaroid. The benefits of scientific progress."
"Fundamentally two ways to kill a person," Stavely said. "Either you stop the heart, or you stop the flow of oxygen to the brain."
"I think she was alive," he said. "When she went in the tub."
"But first I work. First, we all work. We've got to think."
"I don't know," Reacher said. "But I'll find out."
"Easy. I'll go find the guy, and I'll ask him."
"You think you'll find the guy?" Blake repeated.
"Somebody's got to," Reacher said. "You guys aren't getting anywhere."
"People should do what they really want. I think that's important."
"You know what you really want. Everybody always does, instinctively."
"Any doubt you're feeling is just noise, trying to bury the truth, because you don't want to face it."
"Like you want to make partner, I want to be free."
"It's not my parents doing this to me. They're dead."
"But reasons have layers. That's only the top layer."
"People do things for a reason, right? So she's thinking, what's the reason here?"
"Before you convince her you're going to stick around, maybe you should convince yourself."
"On the road or off the road, you can't do both together."
"Not so the Harper family could drive from Aspen to Yellowstone Park on vacation. So the Army could move troops and weapons around, fast and easy."
"A normal person spends twenty grand on a sedan, he goes ahead and orders the chrome wheels and the pearl coat along with it. But the government never did, so their cars looked obvious, artificially plain, like they had big signs painted on the side saying this is a police unmarked."
"Part of being a drifter means you look forward, not backward. You concentrate on what's ahead."
"Everybody's talk, talk, talking, all the time, little black telephones pressed up to their faces. Where does all that conversation come from?"
"If I leave you walking on crutches and drinking through a straw the rest of your life, there's nothing anybody can do to me."
"Whatever he says he's going to do, that's theoretical, way off in the future, and like I told you, it isn't going to happen anyway. But what I'm going to do, it's going to happen right now. Right here."
"Attention will have waned. Boredom will have set in."
"I'm wearing the shirt, but the tie is draped over the chair."
"She'll learn. I'll stick around, house or no house."
"The way I see it, he left me a choice, more than anything."
"Her piano helped. Its sound was big enough to be sonorous, but delicate enough to be nimble."
"Truth, and lies, and means, motive, opportunity. The holy trinity of law enforcement."
"To play this thing properly, you needed to be in some kind of trance."
"But it's not entirely our fault. I think we swallowed a few big lies, too."
"The best place to hide a grain of sand? On the beach."
"Everything we need to know. Some of it, we've known for days. But we screwed up everywhere, Harper. Big mistakes and wrong assumptions."
"Surveillance is important. Certainty is everything."
"We ain't going to crash. And if we do, you're mashed into ground beef and burned to a cinder anyway, so what's to worry about?"
"The water started dissolving the edges of the spiral and thin green color drifted through the tub like clouds."
"Careful," the visitor said. "Now put the can down. And don't make a mess."
"The color changed as the paint dissolved. It went from dark olive to the color of grass growing in a damp grove."
"You remember how it feels? They're in your mouth, and you just suddenly swallow them whole? Just gulp them down?"
"You fall off a horse, you've got to get right back on."
"We're both wet," she said. "But at least now it's over."