“To have the chance of being loved we have to take a chance on being destroyed inside”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Devil's Star
“It was as if the demise of the owner had lent the flat a physical void it hadn't had before. At the same time he had the feeling that he wasn't alone. Harry believed in the existence of the soul. Not that he was particularly religious as such, but it was one thing which always struck him when he saw a dead body: the body was bereft of something...the creature had gone, the light had gone,there was not the illusory afterglow that long-since burned-out stars have. The body was missing its soul and it was the absence of the soul that made Harry believe.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Devil's Star
“Most of the water, however, did not run into the wall, but down it, because water, like cowardice and lust, always finds the lowest level.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Devil's Star
“...stereotypes were self-reinforcing because unconsciously you were looking for things to confirm them. That was why policemen thought – based on so-called experience – that all criminals were stupid, and criminals thought the same about all policemen.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Devil's Star
“[Rakel] It feels a bit like jumping out of a burning house. Falling is better than burning.
[Harry] At least until you land.
[Rakel] I've come to realize that falling and living have certain things in common. For a start, both are very temporary states of being.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Devil's Star
“Wilhelm’s smile reminded Harry of his father’s sad, resigned smile, the smile of a man looking backwards because that’s where the things that made him smile were.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Devil's Star
“...he went into the sitting room, put on a Duke Ellington record he had bought after seeing Gene Hackman sitting on the overnight bus in The Conversation to the sound of some fragile piano notes that were the loneliest Harry had ever heard.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Devil's Star
“Protože voda, zbabělost a chtíč si vždy hledají nejnižší bod.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Devil's Star
“It isn’t a paradox, darling. I just expressed it in that way to sound like one. Everything can be formulated as a paradox. It isn’t difficult. It’s just that true paradoxes don’t exist. True paradoxes, ha, ha. Do you see how easy it is? It’s just words, the lack of precision in language. I have finished with words.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Devil's Star
“Jim Beam is made with rye, barley and a while 75 per cent of maize which gives bourbon the sweet, round taste that marks it out from straight whisky. The water in Jim Beam comes from a source near the distillery in Clermont, Kentucky, where they also make the special yeast that some people maintain is taken from the same recipe Jacob Bean used in 1795.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Devil's Star
“She was what most people would call dead.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Devil's Star
“It’s strange, but when your father has gone you suddenly discover that the choices you have made were as much for him as for yourself.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Devil's Star
“The sitting room shows how you want to present yourself. But in the kitchen everyone relaxes more. It's like you're allowed to be yourself. Did you notice that we relaxed with each other as soon as we came in? - Olaug Siversten”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Devil's Star
“Unfortunately we live in a country that is so rich at the moment that the politicians compete with each other to be the most open-handed. We've become so soft and nice that no-one dares to take the responsibility for doing unpleasant things any more. - Tom Waaler”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Devil's Star
“Man's ability to think rationally when self-interest was at stake was inversely proportional to intelligence. - Aune”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Devil's Star
“Loneliness makes us men weak. - Wilhelm Barli”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Devil's Star
“People are much more used to hearing lies than the truth. - Wilhelm Barli”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Devil's Star
“Good tragedies always have a little humour. - Wilhelm Barli”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Devil's Star
“Whose hart is more crippled, the heart that cannot stop loving or the one that is loved by cannot return that love? - Wilhelm Barli”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Devil's Star
“Harry had felt the gnawing ache for alcohol from the moment he woke up that morning. First as an instinctive physical craving, then as a panic-stricken fear because he had put a distance between himself and his medicine by not taking his hip flask or any money with him to work. Now the ache was entering a new phase in which it was both a wholly physical pain and a feeling of blank terror that he would be torn to pieces. The enemy below was pulling and tugging at the chains, the dogs were snarling up at him from the pit, somewhere in his stomach beneath his heart. God, how he hated them. He hated them as much as they hated him.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Devil's Star
“The Stones are not the world’s greatest band. Not even the world’s second greatest band. What they are is the world’s most overrated band. And it wasn’t Keith or Mick who wrote “Wild Horses”. It was Gram Parsons.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Devil's Star
“Belle Gunness who was that rare thing: a female serial killer. She left for America and married a weed of a man in 1902 and settled down on a farm outside La Porte in the state of Indiana.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Devil's Star
“Without any prior warning, the ground suddenly gave way. He had a falling sensation and he lost all sense of reality. There weren’t four colleagues sitting in front of him in an office, it wasn’t a murder case, it wasn’t a warm summer’s day in Oslo, no-one called Rakel and Oleg ever existed. He knew that this brief panic attack could be followed by others and he hung on by his fingertips. Harry lifted his mug of coffee and drank slowly while he collected himself. He determined that when he heard the sound of the mug being put down on the desk he would be back, here, in this reality.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Devil's Star
“It’s what we call a mare cross, or a devil’s star.’ ‘A mare cross?’ ‘A pagan symbol. They used to carve it over beds or doorways to keep away the mare.’ ‘The mare?”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Devil's Star
“Norwegians were not exactly what you might call a cultured people - Nikolai Loeb”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Devil's Star
“At least until you land.’ ‘I’ve come to realise that falling and living have certain things in common. For a start, both are very temporary states of being.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Devil's Star
“According to the alcoholic’s basic law of life – The Big Thirst – everything that was good, everything, would be lost sooner or later. That was how he had viewed the equation until he met Rakel”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Devil's Star
“Building cathedrals is a calling. In Italy they gave masons who died during the construction of a church the status of a martyr. Even though cathedral builders built for humanity there isn't a single cathedral in human history that was not founded on human bones and human blood. - Tom Waaler”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Devil's Star
“Lavonas atrodydavo kaip tuščias vabzdžio kiautas voratinklyje - esybė būdavo išnykusi, šviesa išnykusi, nelikę to iliuzinio švytėjimo, kurį skleidžia kadai užgesusios žvaigždės. Kūnas būdavo netekęs sielos. Ir būtent sielos nebuvimas įkvėpė Harį tikėti.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Devil's Star
“Harry had underrated intuition before, both other people’s and his own, and it had been to his cost every time without exception.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Devil's Star
Jo Nesbø
Born place: in Oslo, Norway
See more on GoodReads
“They spoke one after the other in a despairing voice, giving expression to their complaints. The workers could not hold out; the Revolution had only aggravated their wretchedness; only the bourgeois had grown fat since ‘89, so greedily that they had not even left the bottom of the plates to lick. Who could say that the workers had had their reasonable share in the extraordinary increase of wealth and comfort during the last hundred years? They had made fun of them by declaring them free. Yes, free to starve, a freedom of which they fully availed themselves. It put no bread into your cupboard to go and vote for fine fellows who went away and enjoyed themselves, thinking no more of the wretched voters than of their old boots. No! one way or another it would have to come to an end, either quietly by laws, by an understanding in good fellowship, or like savages by burning everything and devouring one another. Even if they never saw it, their children would certainly see it, for the century could not come to an end without another revolution, that of the workers this time, a general hustling which would cleanse society from top to bottom, and rebuild it with more cleanliness and justice.”
― Émile Zola, quote from Germinal
“We must not remind them that giants walk the Earth.”
― Frank Miller, quote from Batman: The Dark Knight Returns
“Children are capable of such open rudeness.”
― Trenton Lee Stewart, quote from The Mysterious Benedict Society
“Wear your boots if you wander today”
― Shirley Jackson, quote from We Have Always Lived in the Castle
“The trees thinned just before the crumbling”
― John Grisham, quote from The Client
Blue-Eyed Devil
Pan
Forget You
Justice
Rashōmon and Sevente...
King Solomon's MinesBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
