Quotes from Robert Galbraith

Holly was playing the concerned relative, the devoted sister, and if it was a ham performance Robin was experienced enough, now, to know that there were usually nuggets of truth to be sifted from even the most obvious dross.

If he texted about Morris, there was a good chance that Robin would call him back to find out how Joan was.

lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt as dangerous.' Tansy

He'd been cossetted and wrapped up in cotton wool all his life by his mother, who was a horror .

The thing he'd been trying for years not to look at, and not to name, had stepped out of the dark corner where he'd attempted to keep it, and Strike knew there was no longer any way of denying its existence.

the kettle boiled in its usual crescendo of rattling lid and rambunctious bubbles, condensation steaming up the window behind it.

You could find beauty nearly anywhere if you stopped to look for it, but the battle to get through the

reasons Tassel was too cowardly to represent

Erudite, for a woman who confuses "you're" and "your" and goes in for random capitalisation.' 'We

Strike, who had dealt with several military suicides, knew that survivors were nearly always left with a particularly noxious form of grief, a poisoned wound that festered even beyond that of those whose relatives had been dispatched by enemy bullets.

Why d'you think they feel the need to tell Londoners they're just as good? Isn't that a given?" "Just London, isn't it?" said Strike, as they crossed the road. "Pisses everyone off." "I love London." "Me too. But I can see why it pisses everyone off.

There's pride and then there's stupidity.

Good though his eyesight was, however, he would have been unlikely to spot the Stanley knife being turned rhythmically between long, fine fingers.

When you're living a lie, nothing's more threatening than people who tell the truth…

He felt as though his capacity for loving had been blunted, the nerve endings severed. He

Why were you born when the snow was falling? You should have come to the cuckoo's calling, Or when grapes are green in the cluster, Or, at least, when lithe swallows muster For their far off flying From summer dying. Why did you die when the lambs were cropping? You should have died at the apples' dropping, When the grasshopper comes to trouble, And the wheat-fields are sodden stubble, And all winds go sighing For sweet things dying.

How often were you aware, while it happened, that you were living an hour that would change the course of your life forever? She would remember this room for a long time, and she gazed around it now, with the aim of fixing it in her mind, thereby trying to ignore the sadness, the shame and the pain that burned and twisted inside her.

Was that at the root of her antipathy? An assumption that newsworthiness meant invulnerability?

When Heather pulled her chair in, one of the bright overhead lights illuminated her breasts so that they looked like twin moons; the waiter who'd arrived to hand out menus stared for a few seconds as though dazed.

a fronte praecipitium, a tergo lupi.

The telephone box smelled urinous, of cigarette butts and dirt from a thousand silt-clogged soles.

a curious-looking man, whose ascetic features of pinched nose and black brows were enclosed by rolls of fat around chin and neck, as though a puritan had been engulfed by the body of a jolly squire.

the deathless breath of the city.

The corners of his mouth twitched, but as Robin didn't see him smiling, he felt no compulsion to explain.