Top 160 Robert Galbraith Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “A lot of men find it hard to hear how well their other halves get on with other men.”

— Robert Galbraith

102. “I believe you could bewitch anyone – if you set yourself to do it. Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm.”

— Robert Galbraith

103. “Lucy’s idea of sympathy compared unfavorably with some of the interrogation techniques they had used at Guantanamo.”

— Robert Galbraith

104. “He was well aware that he hadn’t told Polworth the whole truth about his relationship with Robin Ellacott, which, after all, was nobody else’s business. The truth was that his feelings contained nuances and complications that he preferred not to examine. For instance, he had a tendency, when alone, bored, or low-spirited, to want to hear her voice.”

— Robert Galbraith

105. “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.”

— Robert Galbraith

106. “Clues from chaos, sense from madness.”

— Robert Galbraith

107. “My fees are negotiable,’ said Strike, ‘if I like the client.’ He followed Leonora Quine into his office and closed the door behind him with a snap.”

— Robert Galbraith

108. “He left Della sitting in the darkness, a little drunk, with nothing else for company but the picture of the dead daughter she had never seen. Closing the front door, Strike couldn’t remember the last time he had felt such a strange mixture of admiration, sympathy and suspicion.”

— Robert Galbraith

109. “They don’t disappear, the dead. It’d be easier if they did. I can see her so clearly. If she walked up those steps now, part of me wouldn’t be surprised. She was such a vivid person.”

— Robert Galbraith

110. “As always, he found her better-looking in the flesh than in the memory he had of her when not present.”

— Robert Galbraith

111. “Women liked Strike – she had come to realize that over the months they had worked together. She had not understood the appeal when she had started working for him. He was so very different from Matthew.”

— Robert Galbraith

112. “Psychology’s loss,” said Strike, “is private detection’s gain.”

— Robert Galbraith

113. “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.”

— Robert Galbraith

114. “If you want a lifetime of temporary alliances with peers who will glory in your every failure, write novels.” Strike.”

— Robert Galbraith

115. “She lived alone and talked books not babies;.”

— Robert Galbraith

116. “Happiness is a choice that requires an effort at times, and it was well past time for him to make the effort.”

— Robert Galbraith

117. “Frankly, anybody who’s going to kill themselves because of a bad review has no business writing a novel in the first place.”

— Robert Galbraith

118. “Such is the universal desire for fame that those who achieve it accidentally or unwillingly will wait in vain for pity.”

— Robert Galbraith

119. “Robin felt her luck, these days, at having two loving parents. Her work had taught her how many people weren’t that fortunate, how many people had families that were broken beyond repair, how many adults walked around carrying invisible scars from their earliest childhood, their perceptions and associations forever altered by lack of love, by violence, by cruelty.”

— Robert Galbraith

120. “Chiswell’s and Winn’s offices were in the Palace of Westminster itself, which, with its vaulted ceilings, libraries, tearooms and air of comfortable grandeur, might have been an old university college. A half-covered passageway, watched over by large stone statues of a unicorn and lion, led to an escalator to Portcullis House. This was a modern crystal palace, with a folded glass roof, triangular panes held in place by thick black struts.”

— Robert Galbraith

121. “Her family was at least as dysfunctional and peculiar as his own, riven with scenes that to other people might’ve been epoch defining – ‘it was a month before Daddy torched Mummy’s portrait in the hall, and the paneling caught fire, and the fire brigade came, and we all had to be evacuated via the upstairs windows’ – but to the Campbells were so normalized they seemed routine.”

— Robert Galbraith

122. “Yet Strike remained certain her flight to Ross had been self-immolation, done purely for spectacular effect, a Charlottian form of sati.”

— Robert Galbraith

123. “I do,” said Robin in a ringing voice, looking straight into the eyes, not of her stony-faced new husband, but of the battered and bloodied man who had just sent her flowers crashing to the floor.”

— Robert Galbraith

124. “Yet he liked her face. He liked her voice. He liked being around her.”

— Robert Galbraith

125. “You are not writing properly unless someone is bleeding, probably you.”

— Robert Galbraith

126. “Girls like that idea, that little bit of possessiveness. They t’ink it means he only wants her, when o’ course, it’s the other way round. He only wants her available to him. He’s still free to look at other girls...”

— Robert Galbraith

127. “Except that once you had broken up, it was much easier to do so again. He ought to know. How many times had he and Charlotte split? How many times had their relationship fallen to pieces, and how many times had they tried to reassemble the wreckage? There had been more cracks than substance by the end: they had lived in a spider’s web of fault lines, held together by hope, pain and delusion.”

— Robert Galbraith

128. “Doctrine of papal infallibility.”

— Robert Galbraith

129. “So here stood Cormoran Strike, slimmer, fitter, clearer of lung, alone in his attic, poking broccoli angrily with a wooden spoon, thinking about not thinking about Robin Ellacott.”

— Robert Galbraith

130. “In essence, we tend to sort each other and ourselves into groupings, and that usually leads to an overestimation of similarities between members of a group, and an underestimation of the similarities between insiders and outsiders.”

— Robert Galbraith

131. “Then he closed his eyes, and like millions of his fellow humans, wondered why troubles could never come singly, but in avalanches, so that you became increasingly destabilized with every blow that hit you.”

— Robert Galbraith

132. “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?”

— Robert Galbraith

133. “So there was Margot, an outsider in her own home, not even allowed to change the ornaments.”

— Robert Galbraith

134. “Doesn’t anyone ever call you that, among all your many nicknames?’ she wondered as they walked back through to the hall. ‘Call me what?’ ‘“Lightning” Strike?”

— Robert Galbraith

135. “Robin was thinking, is this where single people end up, people without children to look out for them, without double incomes? In small boxes, living vicariously through reality stars?”

— Robert Galbraith

136. “He had spent much of his childhood perched on the coast, with the taste of salt in the air: this was a place of woodland and river, mysterious and secretive in a different way from St. Mawes, the little town with its long smuggling history, where colorful houses tumbled down to the beach.”

— Robert Galbraith

137. “But he was her best friend. This admission, held at bay for so long, caused an almost painful twist in Robin’s heart, not least because she knew it would be impossible ever to tell Strike so.”

— Robert Galbraith

138. “Nevertheless, there was a kind of relief in admitting the painful truth: she cared deeply for her partner.”

— Robert Galbraith

139. “Don’t you think we tend to invest some categories of people with unearned goodness? I suppose we’ve all got a need to trust people who seem to have power over life and death.”

— Robert Galbraith

140. “Every married person he knew seemed desperate to chivvy others into matrimony, no matter how poor an advertisement they themselves were for the institution.”

— Robert Galbraith

141. “People change in ten years,’ the therapist had responded. ‘Why does it have to be a question of you being mistaken in Matthew? Perhaps it’s simply that you’ve both changed?”

— Robert Galbraith

142. “Middle-class gorls, with their mammies and daddies paying their way, they could afford to burn their bras and have hairy armpits.”

— Robert Galbraith

143. “Lucky” was what people who couldn’t bear to contemplate horrors needed to hear maimed and terrorized survivors call themselves.”

— Robert Galbraith

144. “She was the unique woman in his life who’d never tried to change him.”

— Robert Galbraith

145. “He was starting to feel like a truffle pig trying to do its job in a room full of incense, dead fish and strong cheese.”

— Robert Galbraith

146. “Enough, he told his tired, hyperactive brain. Enough. And by the same power of will that in the army had enabled him to fall instantly asleep on bare concrete, on rocky ground, on lumpy camp beds that squeaked rusty complaints about his bulk whenever he moved, he slid smoothly into sleep like a warship sliding out on dark water.”

— Robert Galbraith

147. “But as I’m not going around killing people I don’t like, I don’t think there’s much wrong with admitting some people contribute more to the world than others.’ ‘So you don’t subscribe to “any man’s death diminishes me”?’ said Robin. ‘I wouldn’t feel remotely diminished by the deaths of some of the bastards I’ve met.”

— Robert Galbraith

148. “He’d always been a bad loser. He had to emerge from this embarrassingly short marriage the winner, by walking away with all the money, and stigmatizing Robin as the sole reason for its failure.”

— Robert Galbraith

149. “It’s like a maze. Moment I start thinking I’m getting somewhere, I turn a corner and come up against a dead end. Or find myself back where I started.”

— Robert Galbraith

150. “After a brief hesitation, the doctor accepted Strike’s proffered hand, and as the two men shook, Robin wondered how aware men were of the power dynamics that played out between them, while women stood watching.”

— Robert Galbraith