“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.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Snowman
“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.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Snowman
“Did you know that darkness has a taste, Grandma?”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Snowman
“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.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Snowman
“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.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Snowman
“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.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Snowman
“There's a strong social urge in man to be needed.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Snowman
“Jedes Baby war bei der Geburt ein perfektes Wunder, und das Leben im Grunde nur ein fortlaufender Zerstoerungsprozess.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Snowman
“Sometimes you don’t know what you’re looking for until you find it,” Harry answered. “It’s a methodology.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Snowman
“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?”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Snowman
“For justice is a blunt knife, both as a philosophy and as a judge.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Snowman
“if every baby was a perfect miracle, life was basically a process of degeneration.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Snowman
“already imprisoned inside themselves. Prisons of hatred and self-contempt he recognised all too well.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Snowman
“And what’s your unhappiness due to, Harry?
The words came out before he had time to think. “Loving someone who loves me.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Snowman
“Pain is a good thing; we would never survive without it. We should be grateful for pain.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Snowman
“Perhaps that was a thing about attractive women: A rejection demanded their respect, made them trust you more.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Snowman
“in order to isolate what was possible, you had to eliminate everything that was impossible”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Snowman
“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.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Snowman
“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”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Snowman
“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.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Snowman
“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.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Snowman
“They say that life expectancy is higher for right-handed people than for left-handed.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Snowman
“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,”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Snowman
“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”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Snowman
“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.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Snowman
“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.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Snowman
“¿qué es más malvado? ¿Quitarle la vida a una persona que quiere vivir, o la muerte a una persona que quiere morir?”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Snowman
“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.”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Snowman
“—Las buenas historias no tratan nunca del éxito permanente, sino de los fracasos espectaculares”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from The Snowman
Jo Nesbø
Born place: in Oslo, Norway
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“It is we who are the parasites, and Earth the host”
― Carl Zimmer, quote from Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures
“I am in this same river. I can't much help it. I admit it: I'm racist. The other night I saw a group (or maybe a pack?) or white teenagers standing in a vacant lot, clustered around a 4x4, and I crossed the street to avoid them; had they been black, I probably would have taken another street entirely. And I'm misogynistic. I admit that, too. I'm a shitty cook, and a worse house cleaner, probably in great measure because I've internalized the notion that these are woman's work. Of course, I never admit that's why I don't do them: I always say I just don't much enjoy those activities (which is true enough; and it's true enough also that many women don't enjoy them either), and in any case, I've got better things to do, like write books and teach classes where I feel morally superior to pimps. And naturally I value money over life. Why else would I own a computer with a hard drive put together in Thailand by women dying of job-induced cancer? Why else would I own shirts mad in a sweatshop in Bangladesh, and shoes put together in Mexico? The truth is that, although many of my best friends are people of color (as the cliche goes), and other of my best friends are women, I am part of this river: I benefit from the exploitation of others, and I do not much want to sacrifice this privilege. I am, after all, civilized, and have gained a taste for "comforts and elegancies" which can be gained only through the coercion of slavery. The truth is that like most others who benefit from this deep and broad river, I would probably rather die (and maybe even kill, or better, have someone kill for me) than trade places with the men, women, and children who made my computer, my shirt, my shoes.”
― Derrick Jensen, quote from The Culture of Make Believe
“The argument has long been made that we humans are by nature compassionate and empathic despite the occasional streak of meanness, but torrents of bad news throughout history have contradicted that claim, and little sound science has backed it. But try this thought experiment. Imagine the number of opportunities people around the world today might have to commit an antisocial act, from rape or murder to simple rudeness and dishonesty. Make that number the bottom of a fraction. Now for the top value you put the number of such antisocial acts that will actually occur today.
That ratio of potential to enacted meanness holds at close to zero any day of the year. And if for the top value you put the number of benevolent acts performed in a given day, the ratio of kindness to cruelty will always be positive. (The news, however, comes to us as though that ratio was reversed.)
Harvard's Jerome Kagan proposes this mental exercise to make a simple point about human nature: the sum total of goodness vastly outweighs that of meanness. 'Although humans inherit a biological bias that permits them to feel anger, jealousy, selfishness and envy, and to be rude, aggressive or violent,' Kagan notes, 'they inherit an even stronger biological bias for kindness, compassion, cooperation, love and nurture – especially toward those in need.' This inbuilt ethical sense, he adds, 'is a biological feature of our species.”
― Daniel Goleman, quote from Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships
“In wine was truth, perhaps, but in whisky, the way Hoffman sluiced it down, was an army of imaginary rats climbing your legs.”
― Ross Macdonald, quote from The Chill
“Some of the more industrious ones were washing the windshields of cars that had been trapped by the red light. I used to see them from inside cars and think they brought it on themselves, and they probably did but now it didn't make a difference. I went over to the fire and warmed my hands with the group. I looked at their faces: idiots, criminals, retards, schizophrenics, paranoids, rejects, fuck-ups, broken-down failures. Alone, once children, never asked to be put on this earth, they ended up as jurors. Their lives were the verdict: the system, the man, something had failed.”
― Arthur Nersesian, quote from The Fuck-Up
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