Top 160 Robert Galbraith Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “How could the death of someone you had never met affect you so?”

— Robert Galbraith

2. “We aren’t our mistakes. It’s what we do about the mistake that shows who we are.”

— Robert Galbraith

3. “Kairos moment. An’ it means,” and from somewhere in his soused brain he dredged up words of surprising clarity, “the telling moment. The special moment. The supreme moment.”

— Robert Galbraith

4. “For in every ill-turn of fortune the most unhappy sort of unfortunate man is the one who has been happy. Boethius, De.”

— Robert Galbraith

5. “Popularity’s overrated.”

— Robert Galbraith

6. “The whole world’s writing novels, but nobody’s reading them. We need readers. More readers. Fewer writers.”

— Robert Galbraith

7. “Monday-morning faces: sagging, gaunt, braced, resigned.”

— Robert Galbraith

8. “You can’t plot murder like a novel. There are always loose ends in real life.”

— Robert Galbraith

9. “I think there are a lot of nutters in the world, and the less we reward them for their nuttery, the better for all of us.”

— Robert Galbraith

10. “Optimumque est, ut volgo dixere, aliena insania frui. And the best plan is, as the popular saying was, to profit by the folly of others. Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis.”

— Robert Galbraith

11. “For this I find, where jealousy is fed, Horns in the mind are worse than on the head. Ben Jonson, Every Man in His Humour.”

— Robert Galbraith

12. “It was a glorious thing, to be given hope, when all had seemed lost.”

— Robert Galbraith

13. “Humans often assumed symmetry and equality where none existed.”

— Robert Galbraith

14. “Hell’s built on regret.”

— Robert Galbraith

15. “You could find beauty nearly anywhere if you stopped to look for it, but the battle to get through the days made it easy to forget that this totally cost-free luxury existed.”

— Robert Galbraith

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

— Robert Galbraith

17. “Man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.”

— Robert Galbraith

18. “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.”

— Robert Galbraith

19. “I believe two different kinds of will can exist at the same time in one person. Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm.”

— Robert Galbraith

20. “How often were you aware, while it happened, that you were living an hour that would change the course of your life forever?”

— Robert Galbraith

21. “Strike, who had heard the testimony of Brittany Brockbank and Rhona Laing and many others like them, knew that most women’s rapists and killers were not strangers in masks who reached out of the dark space under the stairs. They were the father, the husband, the mother’s or the sister’s boyfriend...”

— Robert Galbraith

22. “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.”

— Robert Galbraith

23. “Strike felt abnormally huge and hairy; a woolly mammoth attempting to blend in among capuchin monkeys.”

— Robert Galbraith

24. “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.”

— Robert Galbraith

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

— Robert Galbraith

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

— Robert Galbraith

27. “The story, like all the best stories, split like an amoeba, forming an endless series of new stories and opinion pieces and speculative articles, each spawning its own counter chorus.”

— Robert Galbraith

28. “It was four in the morning, the hopeless hour when shivering insomniacs inhabit a world of hollow shadow, and existence seems frail and strange.”

— Robert Galbraith

29. “Can’t you understand that I’d much rather help catch him that sit around waiting for him to pounce?”

— Robert Galbraith

30. “Because men’s crimes are always ours in the final analysis, aren’t they, Mr. Strike? Ultimate responsibility always lies with the woman, who should have stopped it, who should have acted, who must have known. Your failings are really our failings, aren’t they? Because the proper role of the woman is carer, and there’s nothing lower in this whole world than a bad mother.”

— Robert Galbraith

31. “I’m totally serious. Look it up on the net. When women turn, they really turn.”

— Robert Galbraith

32. “The roses, which were for Joan, were also for him: they said, you won’t be alone, you have something you’ve built, and all right, it might not be a family, but there are still people who care about you waiting in London. Strike told himself ‘people,’ because there were five names on the card, but he turned away thinking only of Robin.”

— Robert Galbraith

33. “Nobody who had not lived there would ever understand that London was a country unto itself. They might resent it for the fact that it held more power and money than any other British city, but they could not understand that poverty carried its own flavour there, where everything cost more, where the relentless distinctions between those who had succeeded and those who had not were constantly, painfully visible.”

— Robert Galbraith

34. “The feel of her was both new and familiar, as though he had held her a long time ago, as though he had missed it without knowing it for years.”

— Robert Galbraith

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

— Robert Galbraith

36. “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.”

— Robert Galbraith

37. “The dead girl had her glimpse of earthly paradise: littered with designer goods, and celebrities to sneer at, and handsome drivers to joke with, and the yearning for it had brought her to this: seven mourners, and a minister who did not know her name.”

— Robert Galbraith

38. “Why did the memory of innocence sting so much, as you got older? Why did the memory of the child who’d thought she was invulnerable, who’d never known cruelty, give her more pain than pleasure?”

— Robert Galbraith

39. “Now the sound of her voice, and her laughter, acted on him as it usually did, by making everything seem fractionally less awful.”

— Robert Galbraith

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

— Robert Galbraith

41. “He was a rich white Conservative male, Mr. Strike, and he felt the corridors of power were best populated exclusively by rich white Conservative males. He sought, in everything, to restore a status quo he remembered in his youth. In pursuit of that objective, he was frequently unprincipled and certainly hypocritical.”

— Robert Galbraith

42. “Skirting the rubble and wreckage of the street at the foot of Center Point, he marched past a gigantic gold statue of Freddie Mercury that stood over the entrance of the Dominion Theatre across the road, head bowed, one fist raised in the air, like some pagan god of chaos.”

— Robert Galbraith

43. “Robin remained quite still in front of her dressing table, staring down at the box containing her wedding shoes, thinking. She saw the risks plainly spread beneath her, like the rocks and raging waters beneath a tightrope walker’s feet.”

— Robert Galbraith

44. “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.”

— Robert Galbraith

45. “Hesitation was fatal. Choose.”

— Robert Galbraith

46. “He had found humor in darker places.”

— Robert Galbraith

47. “He had never been able to understand the assumption of intimacy fans felt with those they had never met.”

— Robert Galbraith

48. “Those who did not know the ocean well forgot its solidity, its brutality.”

— Robert Galbraith

49. “I was in therapy for a bit. Now I do CBT exercises.” “Do you, though?” Strike asked mildly. “Because I bought vegetarian bacon a week ago, but it’s not making me any healthier, just sitting there in the fridge.”

— Robert Galbraith

50. “We don’t love each other; we love the idea we have of each other. Very few humans understand this or can bear to contemplate it. They have blind faith in their own powers of creation. All love, ultimately, is self-love.”

— Robert Galbraith