The Snowman

by Jo Nesbø

almost frightening how someone you have been intimate with can fade and vanish. Or perhaps that was why; you had been so close to each other that afterwards, when you no longer were, it seemed unreal, like a dream you soon forget because it had happened only in your head.

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.

Niels Bohr once said that if you aren’t profoundly shocked by quantum physics, then you haven’t understood it.’

‘Our generation has turned itself into servants and secretaries of our children.

And after the rush came the Great Obsession. Which was everything at once: love and intoxication, blindness and clear-sightedness, meaning and madness.