Robert Galbraith Quotes

I am become a name.

Every married person he knew seemed desperate to chivvy others into matrimony, no matter how poor an advertisement they themselves were for the institution.

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.

"I do," said Robin in a ringing voice, looking straight into the eyes, not of her stony-faced new husband, but of the battered and bloodied man who had just sent her flowers crashing to the floor.

"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?"

Many lonely people, Strike knew, found it pleasant to be the focus of somebody’s undivided attention and sought to prolong the novel experience.

Those who did not know the ocean well forgot its solidity, its brutality.

R’bin,” he said, giving up and gazing down at her. “R’bin, d’you know wadda kairos mo…” He hiccoughed. “Mo…moment is?”

“A kairos moment?” she repeated, hoping against hope it was not something sexual, something that she would not be able to forget afterwards, especially as the kebab shop owner was listening in and smirking behind them. “No, I don’t. Shall we go back to the office?”

“You don’t know whadditis?” he asked, peering at her.

“No.”

“ ’SGreek,” he told her. “Kairos. Kairos moment. An’ it means,” and from somewhere in his soused brain he dredged up words of surprising clarity, “the telling moment. The special moment. The supreme moment.”

Oh please, thought Robin, please don’t tell me we’re having one.

“An’ d’you know what ours was, R’bin, mine an’ Charlotte’s?” he said, staring into the middle distance, his unlit cigarette hanging from his hand. “It was when she walk’d into the ward — I was in hosp’tal f’long time an’ I hadn’ seen her f’two years — no warning — an’ I saw her in the door an’ ev’ryone turned an’ saw her too, an’ she walked down the ward an’ she never said a word an,” he paused to draw breath, and hiccoughed again, “an’ she kissed me aft’ two years, an’ we were back together. Nobody talkin’. Fuckin’ beautiful. Mos’ beaut’ful woman I’ve ’ver seen. Bes’ moment of the whole fuckin’ — ’fmy whole fuckin’ life, prob’bly. I’m sorry, R’bin,” he added, “f’r sayin’ ‘fuckin’.’ Sorry ’bout that.”

Robin felt equally inclined to laughter and tears, though she did not know why she should feel so sad.

One mellows almost without realizing it's a compensation of age, because anger is exhausting.

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.

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

"She wuz depressed. Yeah, she wuz on stuff for it. Like me. Sometimes it jus' takes you over. It's an illness," she said, although she made the words sound like "it's uh nillness."

Nillness, thought Strike, for a second distracted. He had slept badly. Nillness, that was where Lula Landry had gone, and where all of them, he and Rochelle included, were headed. 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.

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.

We need readers,” muttered Daniel Chard. “More readers. Fewer writers.

Pretending you’re OK when you aren’t isn’t strength.”
“Well, that’s where you’re wrong,” Robin contradicted him. The champagne had fizzed on her tongue and seemed to give her courage even before it hit her brain. “Sometimes, acting as though you’re all right, makes you all right. Sometimes you’ve got to slap on a brave face and walk out into the world, and after a while it isn’t an act anymore, it’s who you are. If I’d waited to feel ready to leave my room after — you know,” she said, “I’d still be in there. I had to leave before I was ready.