Lethal White

Pretending you're OK when you aren't isn't strength.

Pretending you’re OK when you aren’t isn’t strength.” “Well, that’s where you’re wrong,” Robin contradicted him. The champagne had fizzed on her tongue and seemed to give her courage even before it hit her brain. “Sometimes, acting as though you’re all right, makes you all right. Sometimes you’ve got to slap on a brave face and walk out into the world, and after a while it isn’t an act anymore, it’s who you are. If I’d waited to feel ready to leave my room after—you know,” she said, “I’d still be in there. I had to leave before I was ready.

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.

It was a glorious thing, to be given hope, when all had seemed lost.

How often were you aware, while it happened, that you were living an hour that would change the course of your life forever?

Because men’s crimes are always ours in the final analysis, aren’t they, Mr. Strike? Ultimate responsibility always lies with the woman, who should have stopped it, who should have acted, who must have known. Your failings are really our failings, aren’t they? Because the proper role of the woman is carer, and there’s nothing lower in this whole world than a bad mother.

You can bloody hate someone and still wish they gave a shit about you and hate yourself for wishing it.

It was four in the morning, the hopeless hour when shivering insomniacs inhabit a world of hollow shadow, and existence seems frail and strange.

The feel of her was both new and familiar, as though he had held her a long time ago, as though he had missed it without knowing it for years.

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.

I am not going to let myself be beaten to the ground by the dread of what may happen. Henrik Ibsen,

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

Neither of them could tell who had made the first move, or whether they acted in unison. They were holding each other tightly before they knew what happened, Robin's chin on Strike's shoulder, his face in her hair. He smelled of sweat, beer and surgical spirits, she, of roses and the faint perfume that he had missed when she was no longer in the office. The feel of her was both new and familiar, as though he had held her a long time ago, as though he had missed it without knowing it for year. Through the closed door upstairs the band playing on: I'll go wherever you will go If I could make you mine ...

I was in therapy for a bit. Now I do CBT exercises.” “Do you, though?” Strike asked mildly. “Because I bought vegetarian bacon a week ago, but it’s not making me any healthier, just sitting there in the fridge.

Look me in the eye and tell me you’ve loved anyone, since, like you loved me.” “No, I haven’t,” he said, “and thank fuck for that.

I think marriage is nearly always an unfathomable entity, even to the people inside it.

I believe two different kinds of will can exist at the same time in one person. Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm

It is hard to abruptly shrug off a long-established love Hard, but this, somehow, you must do.

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

that at least, while fighting, she knew she was alive.

Friends of friends had offered everything from management roles in the close protection industry to business partnerships, but the itch to detect, solve, and reimpose order on the moral universe could not be extinguished in him. He doubted it ever would be.

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

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

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.

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.

The live broadcast began with a countdown. A few seconds in, a numbered balloon failed to burst. Let it not be shit, thought Strike, suddenly forgetting everything else in an upsurge of patriotic paranoia.

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.

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?

I believe you could bewitch anyone—if you set yourself to do it. Henrik Ibsen, Rosmersholm