Quotes from Robert Galbraith

People liked to talk; there were very few exceptions, the question was how you made them do it. Some were amenable to alcohol; others liked a spotlight; and then there were those who merely needed proximity to another conscious human being. A subsection of humanity would become loquacious only on one favorite subject; it might be their own innocence, or somebody else's guilt.

He thought of all the times he could have visited, and hadn't. All those missed opportunities to call. All those times he'd forgotten her birthday.

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

Perhaps she had received diamonds, Strike thought; she had always said she didn't care for such things, but when they argued the glitter of all he could not give her had sometimes been flung back hard in his face...

Experience had taught Strike that there was a certain type of woman to whom he was unusually attractive. Their common characteristics were intelligence and the flickering intensity of badly wired lamps.

I think marriage is nearly always an unfathomable entity, even to the people inside it.

She emanated that aura of grandeur that replaces sexual allure in the successful older woman.

A leg?" repeated Detective Inspector Eric Wardle on the end of the line. "A fucking leg? " "And it's not even my size," said Strike, a joke he would not have made had Robin been present.

She couldn't understand a vocation. Some people can't; at best, work's about status and pay cheques for them, it hasn't got value in itself.

A misty radiance, through which stars were struggling to twinkle, filled the night sky beyond the tiny window beside him.

Birthdays in Lucy's world were always celebrated, never forgotten: there must be cake and candles and cards and presents; time must be marked, order preserved, traditions upheld.

The problem wasn't that Robin didn't think she'd love her child. On the contrary, she thought it likely that she would love that child to the extent that this job, for which she had voluntarily sacrificed a marriage, her safety, her sleep and her financial security, would have to be sacrificed in return. And how would she feel, afterward, about the person who'd made that sacrifice necessary?

The instantaneous shift from calm to calamity. The slowing of time. Every sense suddenly wire-taut and screaming.

the women fell silent with the instinctive courtesy women often show to incapacitated males.

And then, at last, the frenzy wore itself into staleness, and even the journalist had nothing left to say, but that too much had been said already.

She lived alone and talked books not babies;

Strike would have advised any friend to leave and not look back, but he had come to see her like a virus in his blood that he doubted he would ever eradicate; the best he could hope for was to control its symptoms.

Popularity's overrated.

Can I ask who you are, sir?" "Yeah, I expect so," said Strike, walking past him and ringing the doorbell. Anstis's dinner invitation notwithstanding, he was not feeling sympathetic to the police just now. "Should be just about within your capabilities.

I love you don't forget me whatever hpapens to me. I love you.

He knew more about the death of Lula Landry than he had ever meant or wanted to know; the same would be true of virtually any sentient being in Britain. 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.

Strike noticed that, in spite of Duffield's air of disorientation and distress, he had made a good job of applying his eyeliner.

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. There was something appealing about restoring a husband to a wife, for a change.

It is hard to abruptly shrug off a long-established love Hard, but this, somehow, you must do.