Quotes from Robert Galbraith

I was the bloody alternative, standing there, right in front of her!

but he brooked no jokes upon Cornish independence, a subject that for Strike had all the appeal of soft furnishings or train-spotting.

fancy you since you first took off your coat in this office. I try not to give names to what I feel for you, because I already know it's too much, and I want peace from the shit that love brings in its wake. I want to be alone, and unburdened, and free.

The women most readily drawn to Strike were, in Polworth's view, neurotic, chaotic and occasionally dangerous, and their fondness for the bent-nosed ex-boxer indicated a subconscious desire for something rocklike to which they could attach themselves like limpets.

She supposed it had been a forlorn hope, but it was something she was very keen to know.

He was alone now, and at a kind of peace. None of the affairs or one-night stands he'd had since Charlotte had touched the essential part of him. He'd sometimes wondered since whether Charlotte had not stunted his ability to feel deeply.

imagined herself telling her fiancé, "But we've got the Land Rover, Matt, there's no point trying to save for an Audi now!" "It could be really useful for work," she said aloud, "if we need to go outside London. Strike

He might have derived a much needed ego-boost from her unabashed pursuit of him, were it not for the fact that he found her combination of entitlement and neediness thoroughly unattractive.

Sometimes she found casual physical contact with men almost unbearable

from which secret meetings with enemies are born".

Maybe (she was deliberately inflaming her own resentment now, and she knew it)

Leda, Lula and Rochelle had not been women like Lucy, or his Aunt Joan; they had not taken every reasonable precaution against violence or chance; they had not tethered themselves to life with mortgages and voluntary work, safe husbands and clean-faced dependants: their deaths, therefore, were not classed as 'tragic', in the same way as those of staid and respectable housewives.

Lucy deploraba su actitud y los motivos que él daba. Ella siempre se ofendía cuando él hablaba de unos objetivos en la vida diferentes a los suyos, como si estuviesen atacando sus decisiones y opiniones.

His own habits of self-discipline, and his preference for cleanliness and order over squalor and chaos, had been forged largely in reaction to his mother's lifestyle. Strike had spent too many hours of his youth enduring the tedium of the perennially stoned to find either pleasure or excitement in the haze of drink, drugs and rock music that had been Leda's natural habitat.

The memory of Strike telling her she was his best friend made her heart feel immeasurably lightened, as though something she hadn't realized was weighing on it had been removed forever. After a moment's pleasurable savoring of this feeling . . .

the conclusion is they've got enough features in common to suggest the same perpetrator. It looks like he uses two knives, a carving knife and a machete. The victims were all vulnerable—prostitutes, drunk, emotionally off balance—and all picked up off the street except for Kelsey. He took trophies from

I try not to give names to what I feel for you, because I already know it's too much, and I want peace from the shit that love brings in its wake. I want to be alone, and unburdened, and free.

And on the menu, it says "bill of fare". They won't use "menu", you see, because it was French.

She's like that, always shifting the goalposts. What was right one minute was wrong the next. You had to walk on eggshells, you really did.

Do whatever you want with this dedication, but don't— don't— use it on your eyebrows.

If Jonny Rokeby turned up here, yes, the press would be fighting tooth and nail to get a shot of him. For fuck's sake. You're not that famous. Get the fuck over yourself.

If only she could come inside his head and see what was there, Strike thought, she'd understand that she occupied a unique place in his thoughts and in his affections.

You can bloody hate someone and still wish they gave a shit about you and hate yourself for wishing it

She'd spent nearly half her life with Matthew, and not until a hard, bright diamond ear stud had appeared in their bed had she realized that he was living a life apart, and was not, and perhaps never had been, the man she thought she knew.