The Running Grave Quotes

“Happiness is a choice that requires an effort at times, and it was well past time for him to make the effort.”
― Robert Galbraith, The Running Grave

“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, The Running Grave

“I’m with Orwell,’ said Strike. “Some ideas are so stupid, only intellectuals believe them”…”
― Robert Galbraith, The Running Grave

“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, The Running Grave

“she knew I was in love with you.”
― Robert Galbraith, The Running Grave

“There’s nothing deader than dead love.”
― Robert Galbraith, The Running Grave

“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.”
― Robert Galbraith, The Running Grave

“you didn’t put me anywhere. I’m not a bloody pot plant, I wanted the job, I volunteered for the job, and I seem to remember getting there by minibus, not being carried there by you.”
― Robert Galbraith, The Running Grave

“No, but I’m saying… we’ve got to forgive who we were, when we didn’t know any better.”
― Robert Galbraith, The Running Grave

“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, The Running Grave

“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, The Running Grave

“All relationships have their own agreed mythology,”
― Robert Galbraith, The Running Grave

“He opened his damp eyes again to stare at the cross on the altar. He might not believe, but the cross meant something to him, nonetheless. It stood for Ted and Joan, for order and stability, but also for the unknowable and unresolvable, for the human craving for meaning in chaos, and for the hope of something beyond the world of pain and endless striving. 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.”
― Robert Galbraith, The Running Grave

“They make a good couple,’ said Pat complacently.

‘We’ll see,’ said Strike.”
― Robert Galbraith, The Running Grave

“I did the same thing, with Matthew. I did exactly that. Painted in the gaps the way I’d have liked them to be. Believed in Higher-Level Truths to explain away the bullshit. “He doesn’t really mean it.” “He isn’t really like that.” And, oh my God, the evidence was staring me in the face, and I bloody married him – and regretted it within an hour of him putting the ring on my finger.”
― Robert Galbraith, The Running Grave

“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, The Running Grave

“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, The Running Grave

“Some ideas are so stupid, only intellectuals believe them”…”
― Robert Galbraith, The Running Grave

“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, The Running Grave

“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, The Running Grave

“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, The Running Grave

“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—’
Strike and Robin had once before sat in this office, after dark and full of whisky, and he’d come dangerously close to crossing the line between friend and lover. He’d felt then the fatalistic daring of the trapeze artist, preparing to swing out into the spotlight with only black air beneath him, and he felt the same now.
‘—she knew I was in love with you.”
― Robert Galbraith, The Running Grave

“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, The Running Grave

“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, The Running Grave

“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, The Running Grave

“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, The Running Grave

“Confucius says… Life leads the thoughtful man on a path of many windings. Now the course is checked, now it runs straight again. Here winged thoughts may pour freely forth in words, There the heavy burden of knowledge must be shut away in silence. But when two people are at one in their inmost hearts, They shatter even the strength of iron or of bronze.”
― Robert Galbraith, The Running Grave

“Thus the superior man pardons mistakes And forgives misdeeds.”
― Robert Galbraith, The Running Grave

“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, The Running Grave

“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, The Running Grave