Robert Galbraith Quotes

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.

Men looked so tragic when they cried.

"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.

We aren’t our mistakes. It’s what we do about the mistake that shows who we are.

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.

But they had already tried, again and again and again, and always, when the first crashing wave of mutual longing subsided, the ugly wreck of the past lay revealed again, its shadow lying darkly over everything they tried to rebuild.

Frankly, anybody who's going to kill themselves because of a bad review has no business writing a novel in the first place.

Fancourt can't write women,' said Nina dismissively. 'He tries but he can't do it. His women are all temper, tits and tampons.

How often were you aware, while it happened, that you were living an hour that would change the course of your life forever?

I think there are a lot of nutters in the world, and the less we reward them for their nuttery, the better for all of us.

Pretending you're OK when you aren't isn't strength.

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

Seven and a half million hearts were beating in close proximity in this heaving old city, and many, after all, would be aching far worse than his.

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.

He experienced one of those moments of simultaneous confusion and clarity that belong to the drunk and the desperate.