Quotes from Robert Galbraith

where there's no capacity for joy, there's no capacity for goodness.

Strike had recently helped several wealthy young women rid themselves of City husbands who had become much less attractive to them since the financial crash.

Bombarded with the story, you grew interested against your will, and before you knew it, you were so well informed, so opinionated about the facts of the case, you would have been unfit to sit on a jury.

No stranger to trouble myself, I am learning to care for the unhappy. Virgil, Aeneid,

but we don't know whether the killer writes." "Oh, nearly everyone does these days," said Fancourt. "The whole world's writing novels, but nobody's reading them.

Keeping busy was the only answer: action had always been his drug of choice. Sure

He had found humor in darker places.

so he sat smoking on the sofa with the lower trouser leg hanging empty towards the floor, lost in thought.

Oh," said Tansy. The monosyllable contained equal parts of surprise and disdain.

We don't love each other; we love the idea we have of each other.

when her mouth puckered into hard little lines around the cigarette, it looked like a cat's anus.

Had she learned how to compose her face into its most photogenic arrangement, to project emotion so beautifully? Or had she simply been a pellucid surface through which her feelings naturally shone?

The argument had been in full swing when Matthew's father telephoned with the news that a funny turn Matthew's mother had suffered the previous week had been diagnosed as a mini-stroke. After this, she and Matthew felt that squabbling about Strike was in bad taste, so they went to bed in an unsatisfactory state of theoretical reconciliation, both, Robin knew, still seething. It was

Robin did not know why the announcement that Strike was off to meet Elin should lower her spirits.

The live broadcast began with a countdown. A few seconds in, a numbered balloon failed to burst. Let it not be shit, thought Strike, suddenly forgetting everything else in an upsurge of patriotic paranoia.

The model? Whoa.' But Spanner's interest in human beings, even when dead or famous, was still secondary to his fondness for rare comics, technological innovation, and bands of which Strike had never heard.

He just saw her for what she was. She was no good. Some women,' she said, her chest heaving beneath the shapeless raincoat, 'aren't.

Mingling grandiosity and short-sightedness in dangerous measure.

So I've been forced to the conclusion," said Strike, "that the Bombyx Mori everyone's read is a different book to the Bombyx Mori Owen Quine wrote.

We are mammals who need sex, need companionship, who seek the protective enclave of the family for reasons of survival and reproduction. We select a so-called loved one for the most primitive reason - my hero's preference for a pear-shaped woman is self-explanatory, I think. The loved one laughs or smells like the parent who gave one youthful succor and all else is projected, all else is invented

More pre-Christmas revelers on the Friday-night Tube: girls in ludicrously tiny glittering dresses risking hypothermia for a fumble with the boy from Packaging.

the boundary between his professional and private lives was, if not precisely non-existent, then flexible and porous,

Are we tryina stop this wedding, Bunsen?" "' Course not," said Strike, pulling out another cigarette. "I was invited. I'm a friend. A guest." "You sacked 'er," said Shanker. "Which ain't a mark of friendship where I come from." Strike refrained from pointing out that Shanker knew hardly anyone who had ever had a job.

He would never know what it was like to feel yourself small, weak and powerless. He would never understand what rape did to your feelings about your own body: to find yourself reduced to a thing, an object, a piece of fuckable meat.