The Running Grave (Cormoran Strike, #7)

by Robert Galbraith

To be circumspect and not to forget one’s armour is the right way to security.

Love had arrived in a form he didn’t recognise, which was doubtless why he’d become aware of the danger too late to head it off.

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.

‘But Will’s real problem,’ said Sir Colin, ‘is that he doesn’t see evil. It’s theoretical to him, a faceless world force to be eradicated.

‘I’m with Orwell,’ said Strike. “Some ideas are so stupid, only intellectuals believe them”…

‘Richer they are, slower they pay.’

Have you ever read Robert Jay Lifton? Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism? Or Combatting Cult Mind Control, by Steven Hassan?’

They passed the open door of a very messy bedroom, which Robin could tell belonged to a teenager

I’d rather face an honest sceptic than a hundred who believe they know God, but are really in thrall to their own piety, their insistence that only they, and their religion, have found the right way.

‘Corm, you shouldn’t have!’ said Lucy, clearly delighted that he had.

for the very first time in their adult lives, it occurred to Strike that his sister’s determination to cling to stability and her notion of normality, her iron-clad refusal to dwell endlessly on the awful possibilities of human behaviour, was a form of extraordinary courage.

here she was again, justifying commitments she knew he wouldn’t have given a second thought to, had he been the one making them.

Thus in all his transactions the superior man Carefully considers the beginning.

The superior man is on his guard against what is not yet in sight and on the alert for what is not yet within hearing…

He was ever more conscious of how much he, the most self-sufficient of men, had come to rely on the fact that she was always there, and always on his side.

he vowed to himself that this would be the last time, ever, he risked his own privacy or career for a pointless affair

Occasionally, when people in the grip of obsessive resentment were pouring out their ire and grievances, something in them, some small trace of self-awareness, heard themselves as others might, and was surprised to find they didn’t sound quite as blameless, or even as rational, as they’d imagined themselves to be.

the worst had happened, so he need never again fear the worst.

a bit of boredom was no bad thing for kids.

I want a good person for a change, Charlotte. I’m sick of filth and mess and scenes.

Some mysteries were eternal and unresolvable by man, and there was relief in accepting that, in admitting it.

Death, love, the endless complexity of human beings: only a fool would claim to fully understand any of them.

If he was lucky, he had half his life to live again, and it was time to give up things far more harmful than smoking and chips, time to admit to himself he should seek something new, as opposed to what was damaging but familiar.

Forgiveness was one thing, but it was a poor management strategy to reward employees for coming clean only when they were forced to do so.

it was sometimes surprising what concerted effort in pursuit of a worthwhile goal could achieve.

Happy families, he thought, didn’t seem to brood on the significance and power of blood ties; it was only voluntarily fatherless mongrels like him who found it strange to see a faint trace of himself in people who were almost strangers.

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.’

“Happiness is a choice that requires effort at times.”

There’s nothing deader than dead love.’

Perhaps it was the delusion of the middle-aged male to think it would make any difference, but there came a time when a man needed to take charge of his own fate.

we’ve got to forgive who we were, when we didn’t know any better.