Robert Galbraith Quotes

Because men’s crimes are always ours in the final analysis, aren’t they, Mr. Strike? Ultimate responsibility always lies with the woman, who should have stopped it, who should have acted, who must have known. Your failings are really our failings, aren’t they? Because the proper role of the woman is carer, and there’s nothing lower in this whole world than a bad mother.

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.

Then he closed his eyes, and like millions of his fellow humans, wondered why troubles could never come singly, but in avalanches, so that you became increasingly destabilized with every blow that hit you.

With the invention of the internet, any subliterate cretin can be Michiko Kakutani.

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.

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.

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

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.

It was four in the morning, the hopeless hour when shivering insomniacs inhabit a world of hollow shadow, and existence seems frail and strange.

"It's an illness," she said, although she made the words sound like "it's uh nillness."
Nillness, thought Strike, for a second distracted. Sometimes illness turned slowly to nillness, as was happening to Bristow's mother... sometimes nillness rose to meet you out of nowhere, like a concrete road slamming your skull apart.

He possessed a finely honed sense for the strange and the wicked. He had seen things all through his childhood that other people preferred to imagine happened only in films.

Who was more conscious than the soldier of capricious fortune, of the random roll of the dice?

You can bloody hate someone and still wish they gave a shit about you and hate yourself for wishing it.

He had hoped to spot the flickering shadow of a murderer as he turned the file's pages, but instead it was the ghost of Lula herself who emerged, gazing up at him, as victims of violent crimes sometimes did, through the detritus of their interrupted lives.

"But people who fundamentally change are rare, in my experience, because it's bloody hard work compared to going on a march or waving a flag. Have we met a single person on this case who's radically different to the person they were forty years ago?"

"I don't know . . . I think I've changed," said Robin, then felt embarrassed to have said it out loud.

Strike looked at her without smiling for the space it took him to chew and swallow a chip, then said,

"Yeah. But you're exceptional, aren't you?"