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“The bat is the Aboriginal symbol of death. Did you know that?”
“Perhaps it’s just that people, wherever they live on the globe, somehow share the same visions or fantasies. It’s in our nature, wired into the hard drive, so to speak. Despite all the differences, sooner or later, we still come up with the same answers.”
“In traditional crime fiction every detective with any self-respect has an unfailing nose for when people are lying. It’s bullshit! Human nature is a vast impenetrable forest which no one can know in its entirety. Not even a mother knows her child’s deepest secrets.”
Love is a greater mystery than death.”
“And the moral is?” Birgitta asked. “Love is a greater mystery than death. And you have to watch out for snakes.”
“That’s the way it’s presented in crime fiction,” he said. “The murderer’s actions are a cry for help; he leaves small coded messages and evidence as the result of an unconscious desire for someone to stop him killing. And sometimes that is how it is. But unfortunately most serial killers are like most people; they don’t want to be caught.
“Intuition is just the sum of all your experience. The way I see it, everything you’ve experienced, everything you know, you think you know and didn’t know you knew is there in your subconscious lying dormant, as it were. As a rule you don’t notice the sleeping creature, it’s just there, snoring and absorbing new things, right. But now and then it blinks, stretches and tells you, hey, I’ve seen this picture before. And tells you where in the picture things belong.”
it’s a question of where you view things from. The point is that everything is relative, isn’t it. And that’s what makes it so bloody complicated.”
“I think people feel a kind of need for punishment when they can no longer accept their own actions. At any rate I yearned for it: to be punished, to be whipped, to be tortured, to be humiliated. Anything so long as I felt accounts were settled.
“Just imagine walking away from something you’ve started. Something you really believed would be good. I don’t think I could ever do that.”
“People are afraid of what they don’t understand. And hate what they’re afraid of.”
Watching TV gives you confidence. When you see how stupid people generally are on the box it makes you feel smart. And scientific studies show that people who feel smart perform better than people who feel stupid.”
“And how long does it take to really know someone?” “Well, Harry, it doesn’t necessarily take very long to get to know the beaten tracks through the big, dark forest. Some people have fine, straight paths and streetlamps and road signs. They seem to tell you everything. But that’s where you should be careful you don’t take anything for granted. Because you don’t find the forest’s animals on illuminated paths, you find them in the bushes and the scrub.” “And how long does it take to know them?” “Depends on who’s there. And the forest. Some forests are darker than others.”
