Top 160 Robert Galbraith Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The detective seemed to remember reading that advertisers used Scottish accents to suggest integrity and honesty. The.”

— Robert Galbraith

52. “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.”

— Robert Galbraith

53. “Handsome in the manner of an Aryan prince, possessor of a trust fund, born to fulfill a preordained place in his family and the world; a man with all the confidence twelve generations of well-documented lineage can give.”

— Robert Galbraith

54. “With a twist in his chest, and in spite of his satisfaction at having done what he’d set out to do, he wished he could have called Joan, and told her the end of Margot Bamborough’s story, and heard her say she was proud of him, one last time.”

— Robert Galbraith

55. “It was difficult for him to decide whether she was sincere, or performing her own character; her beauty got in the way, like a thick cobweb through which it was difficult to see her clearly.”

— Robert Galbraith

56. “Pretending you’re OK when you aren’t isn’t strength.”

— Robert Galbraith

57. “Strike was used to playing archaeologist among the ruins of people’s traumatized memories; he had made himself the confidant of thugs; he had bullied the terrified, baited the dangerous and laid traps for the cunning.”

— Robert Galbraith

58. “A marked desire to be considered more than he felt himself to be; to become endowed, in fact, with that unpredictable, dangerous and transformative quality: fame.”

— Robert Galbraith

59. “He possessed a finely honed sense for the strange and the wicked. He had seen things all through his childhood that other people preferred to imagine happened only in films.”

— Robert Galbraith

60. “Matthew would not like this, she had said. He would have liked it even less had he know how much Strike had liked it.”

— Robert Galbraith

61. “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.”

— Robert Galbraith

62. “Fancourt can’t write women,′ said Nina dismissively. ‘He tries but he can’t do it. His women are all temper, tits and tampons.”

— Robert Galbraith

63. “As suddenly as they had reached for each other, they broke apart. Tears were rolling down Robin’s face. For one moment of madness, Strike yearned to say, “Come with me”, but there are words that can never be unsaid or forgotten, and those, he knew, were some of them.”

— Robert Galbraith

64. “A vast unfocused rage rose in her, against men who considered displays of emotion a delicious open door; men who ogled your breasts under the pretense of scanning the wine shelves; men for whom your mere physical presence constituted a lubricious invitation. Her.”

— Robert Galbraith

65. “No self-respecting blowfly wants to lay eggs in acid.”

— Robert Galbraith

66. “They heard each other only by accident, in brief pauses for breath, each of them howling their resentment and pain across the room like flaming spears that burned into dust before touching their target.”

— Robert Galbraith

67. “In her experience, men like Geraint were astoundingly prone to believe that their scattergun sexual advances were appreciated and even reciprocated.”

— Robert Galbraith

68. “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?”

— Robert Galbraith

69. “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.”

— Robert Galbraith

70. “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...”

— Robert Galbraith

71. “Time had eroded all shock value.”

— Robert Galbraith

72. “Hearing her tell Wardle about the disposable wedding cameras she had ordered had brought home to Strike how soon she would become Mrs. Matthew Cunliffe. There’s still time, he thought. For what, he did not specify, even to himself.”

— Robert Galbraith

73. “In a way, an explanation had never been the point. She had simply liked being the only one who wanted to find out the truth.”

— Robert Galbraith

74. “It’s like you’re traveling in a different direction to the rest of us.”

— Robert Galbraith

75. “He’s a writer,” she said, as though this explained everything. “He’s disappeared before?” “He’s emotional,” she said, her expression glum. “He’s always going off on one, but it’s been ten days and I know he’s really upset but I need him home now.”

— Robert Galbraith

76. “Bestigui, who was five feet six inches at the most, had pushed his way out from behind his desk now; as unafraid of the enormous Strike as a pit bull whose yard has been invaded by a Rottweiler.”

— Robert Galbraith

77. “Abused people cling to their abusers.”

— Robert Galbraith

78. “We don’t love each other; we love the idea we have of each other.”

— Robert Galbraith

79. “I was only going to say that abused people cling to their abusers, don’t they? They’ve been brainwashed to believe there’s no alternative.” I was the bloody alternative, standing there, right in front of her!”

— Robert Galbraith

80. “This, he thought, was how women roped you in. They added you to lists and forced you to confirm and commit. They impressed upon you that if you didn’t show up a plate of hot food would go begging, a gold-backed chair would remain unoccupied, a cardboard place name would sit shamefully upon a table, announcing your rudeness to the world.”

— Robert Galbraith

81. “Strike knew how deeply ingrained was the belief that the evil conceal their dangerous predilections for violence and domination. When they wear them like bangles for all to see, the gullible populace laughs, calls it a pose, or finds it strangely attractive.”

— Robert Galbraith

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

— Robert Galbraith

83. “Sense entered into a short, violent skirmish with instinct and inclination, and was overwhelmed.”

— Robert Galbraith

84. “Erudite, for a woman who confuses “you’re” and “your” and goes in for random capitalisation.’ ‘We can’t all be literary geniuses,’ said Robin reproachfully. ‘Thank Christ for that, from all I’m hearing about them.”

— Robert Galbraith

85. “Strike registered the pronounced asymmetry of his pale blue eyes, one of which was a good centimeter higher than the other. It gave him an oddly vulnerable look, as though he had been finished in a hurry.”

— Robert Galbraith

86. “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.”

— Robert Galbraith

87. “I’d imagine “murderess” trumps “wife” when defining a close relationship.”

— Robert Galbraith

88. “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.”

— Robert Galbraith

89. “The brutal intrusion of officialdom into private devastation.”

— Robert Galbraith

90. “He was not a man who told himself comfortable lies.”

— Robert Galbraith

91. “She thought it might be the very first time that Strike had ever given any indication that he saw her as a woman, and she silently filed away the exchange to pore over later, in solitude.”

— Robert Galbraith

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

— Robert Galbraith

93. “Mingling grandiosity and short-sightedness in dangerous measure.”

— Robert Galbraith

94. “Life had taught him that a great and powerful love could be felt for the most apparently unworthy people, a circumstance that ought, after all, to give everybody consolation.”

— Robert Galbraith

95. “Everyone liked Robin. He liked Robin. How could he fail to like her, after everything they had been through together? However, from the very first he had told himself: this far and no further. A distance must be maintained. Barriers must remain in place.”

— Robert Galbraith

96. “Men looked so tragic when they cried.”

— Robert Galbraith

97. “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.”

— Robert Galbraith

98. “Though they spent so much time trying to make themselves beautiful, you were not supposed to admit to women that beauty mattered.”

— Robert Galbraith

99. “No milk, gone out for breakfast, then to Hamleys, want to beat crowds. PS Know who killed Quine.”

— Robert Galbraith

100. “Charlotte had had the kind of beauty that made men forget themselves midsentence, that stunned them into silence.”

— Robert Galbraith