38 quotes found
“Did you know that darkness has a taste, Grandma?”
“Hurt? He'll never be hurt–he's made to other people.”
“A rat is neither good nor evil. It just does what a rat is suppose to do. From Phantom”
“in order to isolate what was possible, you had to eliminate everything that was impossible”
“You know someone's okay if they can ignore things they can't do anything about and move on.”
“Are you dying?"Cato lit his cigarette. "It's not acute, perhaps, but we're all dying, Harry.”
“I don't think I'll ever feel as famous or as popular as I felt when I was a 17-year-old soccer player in Modle. Only about 20,000 people live there and 12,000 of them come to every game. Running on...”
“Those golden minutes before you are completely awake, when your mind is just drifting, you have no censorship; you are ready to develop any kind of idea. That's when I come up with the best and wor...”
“Until the Eighties, Oslo was a rather boring town, but it's changed a lot, and is now much more cosmopolitan. If I go downtown, I visit the harbour to see the tall ships and the ferries, and to adm...”
“Not even the brightest future can make up for the fact that no roads lead back to what came before - to the innocence of childhood or the first time we fell in love.”
“I have questioned myself about the brutality in the last few novels. Actually in 'The Leopard,' in hindsight, I feel I went a little bit too far with screaming blood. There are a couple of scenes t...”
“For many years, it seemed as if nothing changed in Norway. You could leave the country for three months, travel the world, through coups d'etat, assassinations, famines, massacres and tsunamis, and...”
“Losing your life is not the worst thing that can happen. The worst thing is to lose your reason for living.”
“And what’s your unhappiness due to, Harry?The words came out before he had time to think. “Loving someone who loves me.”
“They had studied law, information technology and art history as part of their beauty treatment, they had let Norwegian taxpayers finance years at university just so that they could end up as overqu...”
“You are Bellman, aren’t you? The genius who sent the sauna ape after me?” Harry nodded toward the Finn.”
“Harry doesn't like people, you see." "I do like people," Harry said. "I just don't like being with them. Particularly when there's a lot of them at the same time.”
“With regard to power, women don’t have the vanity men have. They don’t need to make power visible, they only want the power to give them the other things they want. Security. Food. Enjoyment. Reven...”
“Perhaps that was a thing about attractive women: A rejection demanded their respect, made them trust you more.”
“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?”
“Sick is a relative concept. We’re all sick. The question is, what degree of functionality do we have with respect to the rules society sets for desirable behavior? No actions are in themselves symp...”
“Incidentally, I really agree with those who say that the capacity to forgive says something about the essential quality of a person. I'm the lowest grade.''I didn't mean to criticize you.''I promis...”
“...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 th...”
“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.”
