Richard Castle

“I've been thinking about how ugly gossip is. How it victimizes people, but how as much as we say we hate it, we still feed on it like it was crack.”

“Niiiiiiiikiiiiii, no encuentro sapatos”

“-Esta es la mejor autopsia de la historia -declaró Rook-. Hasta creo que me he meado un poco de la emoción. En serio”

“-Tu teoría sería interesante si no fuera por un pequeño detalle. -¿Cuál? -Que no estaba escuchando”

“Retaliation is not the answer. You're going to have to deal with mean backstabbing girls your whole life, you need to learn to be smart enough to rise above, okay?Did you kick her ass? Good girl!”

“People change when you're not looking.”

“You remember how he used to be girl on either arm? You really don't see that guy too much anymore. Why do you think that is? He's waiting for you. I know you're dealing with stuff but you cannot ask him to wait forever! Unless of course, you're okay with him pulling away.""What if it doesn't work out? What if it ends up like you and Javier?""Well at least we gave it a shot. And so it didn't work out, so what? Now, we can move on give or take the occasional booty call.""I just don't wanna lose what we have, you know?""Girl please! What exactly do you have, really?""A friendship.""No. What you and I have is a friendship. What you and castle have is a holding pattern. How long can you circle before the fuel runs out?”

“Do you want it bad enough to get over being hurt?”

“Rejection isn't failure. Failure is giving up. Everybody gets rejected. It's how you handle it that determines where you'll end up.”

“It pained her that a few hundred words in an also-ran newspaper could get her kicked out. That damned article.And Rook.Her sharpest agony. She had invested in this guy. Waited for this guy. Felt something for this guy that went beyond the bedroom ... or wherever else they took each other. Nikki did not give herself easily to a man, and this betrayal by Rook was why. Heat reflected on her answer at the oral boards about her greatest flaw and admitted her reply was a mask. Yes, her identification with her job was total. But her greatest flaw wasn’t overinvestment in her career. It was her reticence to be vulnerable. Unarmed as she was-literally-she had been emotionally so with Rook.That was the gut shot that had blown clean through her soul.”

“I actually do have a motto,” said Heat. “It’s ‘Never forget who you work for.'" And as she voiced the words, Nikki felt a creeping unease. It wasn’t exactly shame, but it was close. For the first time it sounded hollow. Fake. Why? She examined herself, trying to see what was different. The stress, that was new. And when she looked at that, she recognized that the hardest part of her day lately was working to avoid confrontation with Captain Montrose. That’s when it came to her. In that moment, sitting nearly naked in Rook’s living room, playing some silly nineteenth-century parlor game, she came to an unexpected insight. In that moment Nikki woke up and saw with great clarity who she had become - and who she had stopped being. Without noticing it, Heat had begun seeing herself as working for her captain and had lost sight of her guiding principle, that she worked for the victim.”

“I want to apologize to you, Nikki. Not just, ‘hey, sorry,’ but really. Apologize.” He paused, either to let her absorb it or to find his way, then he went on, “This is all still new to both of us. You and I came to each other with full lives, past baggage, careers, the works. Both of us. And this trip of mine, this was the first time since we got together that you’re seeing what my real work is like. I have the advantage of having gone on ride-along, so you—I get your life, inside and out. Me, I’m an investigative journalist. If I’m doing it right, I’m spending big stretches of time in places nobody else has the balls to go and under conditions most reporters wouldn’t put up with. That explains why I fell off the radar on my story. I told you I might before I left. But it’s no excuse for not calling you when I got in the clear. The only explanation I can give may sound flimsy, but it’s the truth. When I come off assignment, I have a routine. I sleep like the dead and write like the devil, in seclusion. It’s the way I’ve always done it. For years. But now—I realize something’s different now. I’m not the only one involved.“Now, if I could take back the past twenty-four hours, I would, but I can’t. What I can do, though, is say when I look at you now and see the hurt in you—the hurt I caused by being insensitive—I see pain I never want to bring to you again.” He let that sit there, then said, “Nikki, I apologize. I was wrong. And I am sorry.”

“Rook was a journalist but strove to be a storyteller, one who let his subjects speak for themselves and stayed out of their way as much as possible.”

“Anything is possible.""You really believe that?""It's what the great love stories are about, right?Beating the odds.”

“It's so funny castle, you know, at first I loved that he was so busy. It just, it just gave me the opportunity to keep one foot out the door just on case.But with one foot out the door, it's hard to know where you stand. And even if I did what does it mean?”

“I wish the choice I have to make today was so simple. I realise I have the choice to believe in two terrible things. Either Damian is a murderer or Beckett arrested an innocent man.Just thinking about it is making my head hurt.Well then forget your head, listen to your heart.”

“Newsflash she already has body image issues. It's an intrinsic part of being a woman. Every woman in the world has some part of herself that she absolutely hates. Her hands are too small, her feet are too big, her hair is too straight, too curly, her ears stick out, her bums too flat, her nose is too big and, you know, nothing you can say will change how we feel. What men don't understand is, the right clothes, the right shoes, the right makeup it just... It, it hides the flaws we think we have. They make us look beautiful to ourselves. That's what makes us look beautiful to others.Used to be all she needed to feel beautiful was a pink tutu and a plastic tiara.And we spend our whole lives trying to feel that way again.”

“Because if you don't even believe in the possibility of magic you will never ever find it.”

“Everything is fine, everything is just fine. It's ordinary. The problem is I don't want ordinary I want...""Magic?""Yeah, you know what the problem is, we just aren't in love, neither one of us wants to admit it.”

“Or maybe go sci-fi. You sorta look like that guy who roamed outer space everybody's so crazy about." "Malcolm Reynolds?" asked Rook.”

“It was always the same for her when she arrived to meet the body. After she unbuckled her seat belt, after she pulled a stick pen from the rubber band on the sun visor, after her long fingers brushed her hip to feel the comfort of her service piece, what she always did was pause. Not long. Just the length of a slow deep breath. That's all it took for her to remember the one thing she will never forget. Another body waited. She drew the breath. And when she could feel the raw edges of the hole that had been blown in her life, Detective Nikki Heat was ready. She opened the car door and went to work . . . Heat could have made it easier on herself by parking closer, but this was another of her rituals: the walk up. Every crime scene was a flavor of chaos, and these two hundred feet afforded the detective her only chance to fill the clean slate with her own impressions.”

“Around 11 P.M., unable to concentrate on his work or even watch the news, he had started to wonder if this was how it started with stalkers. And then he started to think maybe he'd do his next article as an investigation of stalkers. But then he wondered... if you do a ride-along with a stalker, are you stalking the stalker?It all got very weird.”

“It’s not about knowing. You can never really know someone. It’s really about trust.”— Jameson Rook, Heat Rises”

“There's always a story.”

“There are two kinds of people who sit around all day thinking about killing people...mystery writers and serial killers. I'm the kind that pays better.”

“Showers: I must have wounded him.Storm: With a cookie?”

“Remember what one of our philosophers once said, 'In the human heart there is a perpetual generation of passions, such that the ruin of one is almost always the foundation of another.”

“You said yourself the guy looks like he pleasures himself to pictures of Rahm Emanuel.”

“Ochoa pulled the door and held it open for her. Nikki pivoted around the jamb, squaring her aim up the hall. She stopped, still holding her combat stance, shook her head, and mumbled, “Mother...” ...Rook was standing halfway up the hall with Paxton snugged behind him holding the gun to his head. He looked at Nikki sheepishly and said, “So, I’m gonna guess it’s Noah.”

“You’re not leaving. I told you that.” She worked to keep the calm in her tone to counter his fury. “I’m going to shoot.” “It’s time to put your gun down, Noah.” “His blood will be on you.” Rook made eye contact with her and mouthed, Shoot. Him. She had no shot and said so with the smallest head shake.”

“I’m trying to figure the rules. This isn’t yin and yang, it’s more like yin and yank. The past few days I’ve been going, OK, she doesn’t mix the... romance so well with the single-mindedness of the police work. So it gets me wondering, Is the solution for me to give up our working relationship? Stop my magazine research so we can-?” Nikki grabbed him into a deep kiss. Then she pulled away and said, “Will you shut up?”

“As Toppers rose from her seat on a sofa to meet him, Storm realized that he was looking at an architectural marvel. She weighed less than a hundred pounds and was under five feet tall, but she was so top-heavy that Storm wondered how she kept herself from tumbling facedown when she reached out to shake his hand.”

“We all try. And try as we might to control things, sometimes bad things get in and it's not our fault.”

“When you say things like that to me, I call it a Kardashian. Know why? Because I'm looking for the but.”

“Most people come up against a wall they give up, not you. You don't let go, you don't back down...it's what makes you extraordinary." Castle to Beckett”

“John Lennon said life was what happened while you made other plans. So was death.”

“...but she shook the detective off and her moan revved up into a full-blown 1950's horror film shriek.”

“[She] was trading sex for print. She certainly wouldn't be the first woman to do that, now, would she, Nikki Heat?”

“I really am ruggedly handsome, aren't I?”

“I loves me my Google”

“Best autopsy ever," said Rook. "I think I just peed myself a little. Seriously, I did.”

“As a writer, I can think of no greater terror than confronting a blank page, except perhaps the terror of being shot at.”

“Nikki paid attention to nags because they were the voices God gave to clues.”

“There are two kinds of folks who sit around thinking about how to kill people: psychopaths and mystery writers.”

“You’re like my wife.”“Because I’m not sleeping with you either?”

“He wrote as if he were the reader. It was also how he kept his writing from becoming too cute, which is to say, about him not the subject. Rook was a journalist but strove to be a storyteller, one who let his subjects speak for themselves and stayed out of their way as much as possible.”

“Go ahead. Rip my bodice.”