Quotes from Robert Galbraith

Lately she had become simply grateful for time without Matthew, when she could relax, not having to hide anything, whether the work she was doing on the Chiswell case or the panic attacks that must be conducted quietly, without fuss, on the bathroom floor.

Robin was thinking, is this where single people end up, people without children to look out for them, without double incomes? In small boxes, living vicariously through reality stars?

Being sworn at by random people was the price you paid for living in London,

Automatically, without considering what he was doing, but with the same desire for comfort that had pushed him into this café, Strike pulled his phone out of his pocket again and called Robin . . .

Time had eroded all shock value.

She's not big on achievements either: she says so on her tumblr page. Feeling guilty about not achieving stuff is the result of internalised capitalism, apparently.' 'Seriously?' 'Oh yeah. You never been to a communist country? Everyone lies on sofas all day while trained poodles bring them cake.

Her family was at least as dysfunctional and peculiar as his own, riven with scenes that to other people might've been epoch defining—'it was a month before Daddy torched Mummy's portrait in the hall, and the paneling caught fire, and the fire brigade came, and we all had to be evacuated via the upstairs windows'—but to the Campbells were so normalized they seemed routine.

As long as you don't have to see it, all good, eh?

She was the unique woman in his life who'd never tried to change him.

Charlotte had had the kind of beauty that made men forget themselves midsentence, that stunned them into silence.

Can I just ask—are you the Cormoran Strike?" "I doubt there are many others," said Strike.

He had a secret but deep-rooted aversion to women drivers, a prejudice he ascribed largely to early, nerve-wracking experiences with all his female relatives.

Why do people do this?' 'Blog, you mean? I don't know ... didn't someone once say the unexamined life isn't worth living?' 'Yeah, Plato,' said Strike, 'but this isn't examining a life, it's exhibiting it.

He drank as though his beer was medicine, without pleasure, intent on the result.

he inwardly acknowledged the irony that, had Ilsa not been so keen to act as midwife to a romantic relationship between himself and Robin, he might now have been sitting in Nick and Ilsa's flat in Octavia Road, enjoying a laugh with two of his old friends and indeed with Robin herself, whose company had never yet palled on him, through the many long hours they had worked together.

Strike thought of his own guilty wish that Joan's slow and protracted dying would be over soon. A corpse, however unwelcome, meant anguish could find both expression and sublimation among flowers, speeches and ritual, consolation drawn from God, alcohol and fellow mourners; an apotheosis reached, a first step taken toward grasping the awful fact that life was extinct, and life must go on.

La mancanza di critiche, o anche solo di una silenziosa disapprovazione da parte di Robin, era una cosa davvero singolare per Strike. Era l'unica persona di sesso femminile nella sua vita che non avesse cercato di migliorarlo o correggerlo.

Except that, almost against his will, he did care about Robin. He felt familiar stirrings of a desire to make her happy that irked him . . .

The dead could only speak through the mouths of those left behind, and through the signs they left scattered behind them. Strike had felt the living woman behind the words she had written to friends; he had heard her voice on a telephone held to his ear; but now, looking down on the last thing she had ever seen in her life, he felt strangely close to her.

Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas. Lucky is he who has been able to understand the causes of things Virgil, Georgics, Book 2

We aren't our mistakes. It's what we do -about- the mistake that shows who we are. [Dr. Margot Bamborough to Gloria Conti]

Yet Strike remained certain her flight to Ross had been self-immolation, done purely for spectacular effect, a Charlottian form of sati.

Her round, mascara-streaked face looked back at him out of the rear window. He forced a grin and a wave before lighting another cigarette, and reflecting that Lucy's idea of sympathty compared unfavourably with some of the interrogation techniques they had used at Guantanamo.

will you turn on the radio? I fancy a bit of music," she said. "Louder than that, sweetie. Oh, I love this." "Telephone" by Lady Gaga filled the car.