"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 … - Robert Galbraith

There’s people who’d expect you to take a bullet for them and they don’t bother rememb’ring yuh name.

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.

Though they spent so much time trying to make themselves beautiful, you were not supposed to admit to women that beauty mattered.