The Snowman (Harry Hole, #7)

by Jo Nesbø

You were obsessed. You are your job, and what drives you isn’t love or a sense of responsibility. It’s not even personal ambition. It’s anger. And the desire for revenge. And that’s not right,

Soon the first snow will come. And then he will appear again. The snowman. And when the snow has gone, he will have taken someone else. What you should ask yourself is this: “Who made the snowman?

makes snowmen? Who gave birth to the Murri?” For the snowman doesn’t know.

“I didn’t think it was them calling.” “Who did you think it was, then?” “The others. Did you know that darkness has a taste, Grandma?”

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 instantly felt ashamed. Why did he always have to instigate these childish, meaningless wall-pissing contests, just to have the satisfaction of giving someone else—anyone at all—the finger? Rakel had once said that he wished he’d been born with an extra middle finger that was permanently sticking

Harry had read that the word deadline originated from the battlefields of the American Civil War, when, for lack of anything material to lock prisoners behind, the captors gathered together the prisoners and a line was drawn around them in the dirt. Which became known as the “dead line,” and anyone who strayed beyond it was shot.

In psychology we have set up a number of corrals that our cattle refuse to be herded into.

“What makes a person like this woman so psychologically sick?” Aune groaned. “Everything in existence! And nothing! Nature and nurture.”