Robert Galbraith Quotes

Except that once you had broken up, it was much easier to do so again. He ought to know. How many times had he and Charlotte split? How many times had their relationship fallen to pieces, and how many times had they tried to reassemble the wreckage? There had been more cracks than substance by the end: they had lived in a spider's web of fault lines, held together by hope, pain and delusion.

". . . you know who Polworth is?"

"Your best mate," said Robin.

"He's my oldest mate," Strike corrected her. "My best mate . . . "

For a split second he wondered whether he was going to say it, but the whisky had lifted the guard he usually kept upon himself: why not say it, why not let go?

" . . . is you."

Robin was so amazed, she couldn't speak. Never, in four years, had Strike come close to telling her what she was to him. Fondness had had to be deduced from offhand comments, small kindnesses, awkward silences or gestures forced from him under stress. She'd only once before felt as she did now, and the unexpected gift that had engendered the feeling had been a sapphire and diamond ring, which she'd left behind when she walked out on the man who'd given it to her.

She wanted to make some kind of return, but for a moment or two, her throat felt too constricted.

"I . . . well, the feeling's mutual," she said, trying not to sound too happy.

In the depths of his tiredness, surrounded by these blank, sheep-like visages, he found himself pondering the accidents that had brought all of them into being. Every birth was, viewed properly, mere chance. With a hundred million sperm swimming blindly through the darkness, the odds against a person becoming themselves were staggering.

Nobody who had not lived there would ever understand that London was a country unto itself. They might resent it for the fact that it held more power and money than any other British city, but they could not understand that poverty carried its own flavour there, where everything cost more, where the relentless distinctions between those who had succeeded and those who had not were constantly, painfully visible.

I am not going to let myself be beaten to the ground by the dread of what may happen. Henrik Ibsen,

Writers are different,” said Waldegrave. “I’ve never met one who was any good who wasn’t screwy.

The story, like all the best stories, split like an amoeba, forming an endless series of new stories and opinion pieces and speculative articles, each spawning its own counter chorus.

…difficile est longum subito deponere amoren, difficile est, uerum hoc qua lubet efficias… …it is hard to throw off long-established love: Hard, but this you must manage somehow…

All love, ultimately, is self-love.

As suddenly as they had reached for each other, they broke apart. Tears were rolling down Robin's face. For one moment of madness, Strike yearned to say, “Come with me”, but there are words that can never be unsaid or forgotten, and those, he knew, were some of them.

Look me in the eye and tell me you’ve loved anyone, since, like you loved me.”
“No, I haven’t,” he said, “and thank fuck for that.

You're like everyone else, Strike; you want your civil liberties when you've told the missus you're at the office and you're at a lap-dancing club, but you want twenty-four-hour surveillance on your house when someone's trying to force your bathroom window open. Can't have it both ways.

So here stood Cormoran Strike, slimmer, fitter, clearer of lung, alone in his attic, poking broccoli angrily with a wooden spoon, thinking about not thinking about Robin Ellacott.

He was sorry, genuinely sorry, for the pain she was in. Yet the revelation had caused certain other feelings — feelings he usually kept under tight rein, considering them both misguided and dangerous — to flex inside him, to test their strength against their restraining bonds.

The feel of her was both new and familiar, as though he had held her a long time ago, as though he had missed it without knowing it for years.