Top 180 Robert Galbraith Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “However, Strike knew that the truly deluded would happily discount such trivialities as DNA evidence, citing contamination, or conspiracy. They saw what they wanted to see, blind to inconvenient, implacable truth.”

— Robert Galbraith

152. “Even if Heather had barely known her, as seemed to be the case, her frank enjoyment of her fancy lunch and her persistent eyeing-up of Strike seemed both inappropriate and distasteful to Robin.”

— Robert Galbraith

153. “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

154. “Lately she had become simply grateful for time without Matthew, when she could relax, not having to hide anything, whether the work she was doing on the Chiswell case or the panic attacks that must be conducted quietly, without fuss, on the bathroom floor.”

— Robert Galbraith

155. “He had a secret but deep-rooted aversion to women drivers, a prejudice he ascribed largely to early, nerve-wracking experiences with all his female relatives.”

— Robert Galbraith

156. “He drank as though his beer was medicine, without pleasure, intent on the result.”

— Robert Galbraith

157. “As long as you don’t have to see it, all good, eh?”

— Robert Galbraith

158. “Strike thought of his own guilty wish that Joan’s slow and protracted dying would be over soon. A corpse, however unwelcome, meant anguish could find both expression and sublimation among flowers, speeches and ritual, consolation drawn from God, alcohol and fellow mourners; an apotheosis reached, a first step taken toward grasping the awful fact that life was extinct, and life must go on.”

— Robert Galbraith

159. “He’d had enough experience of both kinds of misfortune to know that there was a vast difference between feeling yourself a victim of random strokes of fate and having to accept that your troubles had been brought about by your own folly.”

— Robert Galbraith

160. “He is strangely attractive, isn’t he? Bit beaten-up-looking, but I’ve never minded that.”

— Robert Galbraith

161. “He had an innate dislike of scheduled celebration and forced jollity, and of all inane practices, having ‘Happy Birthday’ sung to him was one of his least favourites.”

— Robert Galbraith

162. “There’s no pride in having what you never worked for. Never let the other chap change your game plan. Stick to your own, and play to your strengths.”

— Robert Galbraith

163. “Strike, who had been raised by a mother who listened mainly to metal bands, knew very little about classical music, but there was a looming, ominous quality about this music that he didn’t particularly care for.”

— Robert Galbraith

164. “There’s nothing deader than dead love.”

— Robert Galbraith

165. “And I swear to you, he looked murderous. He stepped right up to me, the way a man will when he wants to remind you what he could do, if he wanted.”

— Robert Galbraith

166. “That’s the problem with communal buildings. They’re only as secure as the least security-conscious person living there.”

— Robert Galbraith

167. “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.”

— Robert Galbraith

168. “A lot of people have dreadful childhoods and don’t take to strangling small children,’ said the implacable Strike, to nods of agreement from Dennis and Pat.”

— Robert Galbraith

169. “Thus the superior man pardons mistakes And forgives misdeeds.”

— Robert Galbraith

170. “Jasper always said, “Tory faithful likes bastards or buffoons”, and that he was neither one nor the other.”

— Robert Galbraith

171. “No,’ said Strike, ’but there was an alcoholic ex-Classics teacher in one of the squats my mother took me to live in. He used to drop pearls of wisdom like that, mainly to patronise us all.”

— Robert Galbraith

172. “I have forged me in sevenfold heats A shield from foes and lovers, And no one knows the heart that beats Beneath the shield that covers.”

— Robert Galbraith

173. “Strike was becoming steadily more taciturn, his expression brooding. Robin wondered whether this was because he was hungry – he was a man who needed regular sustenance to maintain an equable mood – or for some darker reason.”

— Robert Galbraith

174. “Strike missed the absence of an overriding objective, in pursuit of which he could shelve his sadness; missed the imperative to dismiss pain and distress in the service of something greater, which had sustained him in the military.”

— Robert Galbraith

175. “Too many people, even intelligent ones – no, especially intelligent ones – presume innocence when they meet weirdness. ‘Bit odd but I mustn’t let my prejudices cloud my judgement.’ Then they overcorrect, and what d’you get?”

— Robert Galbraith

176. “The idea of suggesting that Strike stop lying to the women in his life occurred only to be dismissed, on the basis that the resolutions to stop smoking, lose weight and exercise were enough personal improvement to be getting on with.”

— Robert Galbraith

177. “Don’t say you didn’t mean to upset me,’ said Robin through gritted teeth. ‘That’s what men always say when – I’m angry, not sad. You don’t get it. You don’t know what that place does to people. I do, and.”

— Robert Galbraith

178. “He had a thick white moustache and a slight overbite, faintly reminiscent of a rabbit or, if you were being unkind, of the standard impersonation of an upper-class twit.”

— Robert Galbraith

179. “How many more burdens was he supposed to bear? Had he not paid enough, given enough, sacrificed enough – loved enough?”

— Robert Galbraith

180. “Always a bit of delusion in love, isn’t there? You fill in the blanks with your own imagination. Paint them exactly the way you want them to be.”

— Robert Galbraith

181. “It’s dangerous to make a cult of your own unhappiness. Hard to get out, once you’ve been in there too long. You forget how.”

— Robert Galbraith

182. “He experienced one of those moments of simultaneous confusion and clarity that belong to the drunk and the desperate.”

— Robert Galbraith

183. “It is the great misfortune of the coward that he sees danger everywhere, and of the snob that he perpetually underestimates those he considers his inferiors.”

— Robert Galbraith

184. “But Margot romanticized uprisings of people in distant lands. She didn’t judge brown rapists and torturers by the same standards she would have applied to white men who drowned children for being the wrong religion. She believed, I think, like Suhrawardy, that ’bloodshed and disorder are not necessarily evil in themselves, if resorted to for a noble cause.”

— Robert Galbraith

185. “Wace’s charm and ease of manner, his smile, his warmth, had vanished. Once before, Strike had faced a killer whose eyes, under the stress and excitement of hearing his crimes described, had become as black and blank as those of a shark, and now he saw the phenomenon again: Wace’s eyes might have turned into empty boreholes.”

— Robert Galbraith

186. “Robin turned her iPad so that Strike could see it. He moved his chair in: Robin felt his knee bump hers.”

— Robert Galbraith

187. “I think,’ said Strike, ’the proportion of people who could be persuaded to commit terrible acts, given the right circumstances, is higher than most of us would like to think.”

— Robert Galbraith

188. “Strike looked down at his own plate: where there should have been chips, there was only salad.”

— Robert Galbraith

189. “Men are generally predisposed to think they’re being flirted with.”

— Robert Galbraith

190. “The inferior thing seems so harmless and inviting that a man delights in it; it looks so small and weak that he imagines he may dally with it and come to no harm.”

— Robert Galbraith

191. “A stab of cold shock, an electric charge to the brain: Robin couldn’t quite believe what she’d just heard. The passing seconds seemed to slow. She waited for Strike to say ‘which was her spite, obviously,’ or, ‘because she never understood that a man and a woman could just be friends’, or to make a joke. Yet he said nothing to defuse the grenade he’d just thrown, but simply looked at her.”

— Robert Galbraith

192. “Not for the first time, he had cause to marvel at the fact that the woman who’d come to him as a temporary secretary had proven to be the agency’s biggest asset.”

— Robert Galbraith

193. “Manson had achieved it more successfully, because his myth would not fluctuate with fashion: evil was always fascinating.”

— Robert Galbraith

194. “She said that even though I was a bastard to her, she still loved me. That I’d know one day what I’d given up, that I’d never be happy, deep down, without her. That – she knew I was in love with you.”

— Robert Galbraith

195. “Time would tell whether he’d just done something foolish or not, but Cormoran Strike had at last decided to practise what he’d preached to Charlotte, all those years ago. Happiness is a choice that requires an effort at times, and it was well past time for him to make the effort.”

— Robert Galbraith

196. “Now, for the first time, Robin truly appreciated the bravery it must have taken for Kevin Pirbright, who’d lived at the farm since the age of three, to break free and walk out into what must have seemed to him a strange and overwhelming world of which he didn’t know the rules, with hardly any money, no job, and only the tracksuit he was wearing.”

— Robert Galbraith