The Snowman

I´ve read that it´s the smell some carnivores use to find their prey. Imagine the trembling victim trying to hide, but knowing that the smell of its own fear will kill it.

Evil is not a thing. It cannot take possession of you. It’s the opposite; it’s a void, an absence of goodness. The only thing you can be frightened of here is yourself.

Did you know that darkness has a taste, Grandma?

Do what boxers do, sway with the punches. Don’t resist. If any of what happens at work gets to you, just let it. You won’t be able to shut it out in the long term anyway. Take it bit by bit, release it like a dam, don’t let it collect until the wall develops cracks.

Good stories are never about a string of successes but about spectacular defeats,” Støp had said. “Even though Roald Amundsen won the race to the South Pole, it’s Robert Scott the world outside Norway remembers. None of Napoleon’s victories is remembered like the defeat at Waterloo. Serbia’s national pride is based on the battle against the Turks at Kosovo Polje in 1389, a battle the Serbs lost resoundingly. And look at Jesus! The symbol of the man who is claimed to have triumphed over death ought to be a man standing outside the tomb with his hands in the air. Instead, throughout time Christians have preferred the spectacular defeat: when he was hanging on the cross and close to giving up. Because it’s always the story of the defeat that moves us most.

We're capable of understanding that someone has to drop an atomic bomb on a town of innocent civilians, but not that others have to cut up prostitutes who spread disease and moral depravity in the slums of London. Hence we call the former realism and the latter madness.

There's a strong social urge in man to be needed.

Sometimes you don’t know what you’re looking for until you find it,” Harry answered. “It’s a methodology.

No one can leave someone they have good sex with. They can try, but they always go back. We’re simple souls like that, aren’t we?

For justice is a blunt knife, both as a philosophy and as a judge.

if every baby was a perfect miracle, life was basically a process of degeneration.

already imprisoned inside themselves. Prisons of hatred and self-contempt he recognised all too well.

And what’s your unhappiness due to, Harry? The words came out before he had time to think. “Loving someone who loves me.

Pain is a good thing; we would never survive without it. We should be grateful for pain.

Perhaps that was a thing about attractive women: A rejection demanded their respect, made them trust you more.

in order to isolate what was possible, you had to eliminate everything that was impossible

Our bodyguard is a born-again Christian with a father complex, a drinking problem, intellectual limitations and not enough backbone to do his military service with honor.

Don’t, he thought. Don’t let it happen. Evil is not a thing. It cannot take possession of you. It’s the opposite; it’s a void, an absence of goodness. The only thing you can be frightened of here is yourself. Harry

Four years later, after Mathias had killed a further four women, and he could see that all the murders were an attempt to reconstruct the murder of his mother, he concluded that he was mad.

Evil is not a thing, it cannot take possession of you. It’s the opposite; it’s a void, an absence of goodness. The only thing you can be frightened of here is yourself.

They say that life expectancy is higher for right-handed people than for left-handed.

that evil is evil, mental illness or no. We’re all more or less disposed to evil actions, but our disposition cannot exonerate us. For heaven’s sake, we’re all sick with personality disorders. And it’s our actions which define how sick we are. We’re equal before the law,

new; it had been lying there with all the other half-thought, half-chewed, half-dreamed ideas. The third chicken had been killed in the same way as Sylvia, with an electric cutting loop. He went to the place where the floorboards had absorbed the blood and crouched down. If the Snowman had killed the last chicken, why had he used the loop and not the hatchet? Simple. Because the hatchet had disappeared in the depths of the forest somewhere. So this must have happened after the murder. He had come all the way back here and slaughtered a chicken. But why? A kind of voodoo ritual? A sudden inspiration? Bullshit—this killing machine stuck to the

The more aged I become, the more I tend to the view that evil is evil, mental illness or no. We’re all more or less disposed to evil actions, but our disposition cannot exonerate us. For heaven’s sake, we’re all sick with personality disorders. And it’s our actions that define how sick we are.

But that was the way it was when you exposed yourself to the risks of maintaining fixed low rates; you always won the competition for the worst jobs.

¿qué es más malvado? ¿Quitarle la vida a una persona que quiere vivir, o la muerte a una persona que quiere morir?

The word—flæsk—was articulated with Bergensian tones and gravity. That is, with a soft l, a long æ with a dip in the middle and a faint s. Peter Flesch, who voluntarily pronounced his name like the word for flab, was out of breath, loud and obliging.