Tom > Tom's Quotes

“Like the rest of the Québécois? Like Beauvoir himself? Did they curse the Church? Câlice! Tabernac! Hostie! The Québécois had turned religious words into dirty words.”
― Louise Penny, The Beautiful Mystery

“Beauvoir knew that the root of all evil wasn’t money. No, what created and drove evil was fear. Fear of not having enough money, enough food, enough land, enough power, enough security, enough love. Fear of not getting what you want, or losing what you have.”
― Louise Penny, The Beautiful Mystery

“Plenty of time for a close friendship to turn to hate. As only a good friendship could. The conduit to the heart was already created.”
― Louise Penny, The Beautiful Mystery

“Since the 1970s, we have successfully increased our fruits and vegetables by 17 percent, our grains by 29 percent, and reduced the amount of fat we eat from 43 percent to 33 percent of calories or less. The share of those fats that are saturated has also declined, according to the government’s own data. (In these years, Americans also began exercising more.) Cutting back on fat has clearly meant eating more carbohydrates such as grains, rice, pasta, and fruit. A breakfast without eggs and bacon, for instance, is usually one of cereal or oatmeal; low-fat yogurt, a common breakfast choice, is higher in carbohydrates than the whole-fat version, because removing fat from foods nearly always requires adding carbohydrate-based “fat replacers” to make up for lost texture.”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“Giving up animal fats has also meant shifting over to vegetable oils, and over the past century the share of these oils has grown from zero to almost 8 percent of all calories consumed by Americans, by far the biggest change in our eating patterns during that time. In this period, the health of America has become strikingly worse. When the low-fat, low-cholesterol diet was first officially recommended to the public by the American Heart Association (AHA) in 1961, roughly one in seven adult Americans was obese. Forty years later, that number was one in three. (It’s heartbreaking to realize that the federal government’s “Healthy People” goal for 2010, a project begun in the mid-1990s, for instance, was simply to return the public back to levels of obesity seen in 1960, and even that goal was unreachable.)”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“During these decades, we’ve also seen rates of diabetes rise drastically from less than 1 percent of the adult population to more than 11 percent, while heart disease remains the leading cause of death for both men and women. In all, it’s a tragic picture for a nation that has, according to the government, faithfully been following all the official dietary guidelines for so many years. If we’ve been so good, we might fairly ask, why is our health report card so bad?”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“Finally, there was the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI), a trial that enrolled 49,000 women in 1993 with the expectation that when the results came back, the benefits of a low-fat diet would be validated once and for all. But after a decade of eating more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains while cutting back on meat and fat, these women not only failed to lose weight, but they also did not see any significant reduction in their risk for either heart disease or cancer of any major kind. WHI was the largest and longest trial ever of the low-fat diet, and the results indicated that the diet had quite simply failed.”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“The practice of good science requires that when we observe something that doesn’t fit a hypothesis, these observations need to be reckoned with somehow.”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“For half a century, nutrition experts have been dedicated to the hypothesis that fat, especially saturated fat, causes heart disease (plus obesity and cancer). Any evidence to the contrary has been difficult, if not impossible, for experts to acknowledge—even though there has been plenty of it. A careful look at the vast body of scientific observations about diet and health shows a surprising and unexpected picture, and one that does not seem to support a solid argument against saturated fat.”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“From the start, one of the main factors in the discussion of heart disease has been cholesterol, the yellow, waxy substance that is a necessary part of all body tissues. It is a vital component of every cell membrane, controlling what goes in and out of the cell.”
― Nina Teicholz, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

“You can, if you want to, get reeeeeeallllly precise about things use a measuring spoon; no joke, one to two tablespoons of detergent is all you’ll need!”
― Jolie Kerr, My Boyfriend Barfed in My Handbag . . . and Other Things You Can't Ask Martha

“Glamour-hounds and donor-hogs they may be but he loved them.”
― Tim Winton, Eyrie

“Every vegetable, every bit of protein on the list had a provenance more complex than a minor Rembrandt.”
― Tim Winton, Eyrie

“Thinks the sun shines out yer clacker.”
― Tim Winton, Eyrie

“Rare as rocking-horse turds, these days, feeling halfway to decent, with barely a sick twinge, and he was damned if he’d waste”
― Tim Winton, Eyrie

“Here, said the nuggety bald fixture. You look dry as a camel’s cookie.”
― Tim Winton, Eyrie

“watched the close-cropped, long-legged policeman with the bad back stride quickly out of the canteen.”
― Jo Nesbø, Nemesis

“It was gone now, the little smile, the glee that Spite gives. The Small-mindedness. The Self-righteousness. The Sadism. The four ‘S’s of revenge.”
― Jo Nesbø, Nemesis

“The social space between people who don’t know each other is from one to three and a half metres. That’s the distance you would keep if the situation allowed, but look at bus queues and toilets. In Tokyo people stand closer to each and feel comfortable, but variations from culture to culture are in fact relatively minor.”
― Jo Nesbø, Nemesis

“off that for a long time. I was an alcoholic before I was thirty. Perhaps before I was twenty, it depends on how you look at things. They say it’s in your genes. Possibly. When I grew up I found out my grandfather in Åndalsnes had been drunk every day for fifty years. We went there every summer until I was fifteen and never noticed a thing. Unfortunately I haven’t inherited that talent. I’ve done things which have not exactly gone unnoticed. In a nutshell, it’s a miracle I’ve still got a job in the police force.”
― Jo Nesbø, Nemesis

“Truth walks toward us on the paths of our questions...as soon as you think you have the answer, you have closed the path and may miss vital new information. Wait awhile in the stillness, and do not rush to conclusions, no matter how uncomfortable the unknowing.”
― Jacqueline Winspear, Maisie Dobbs

“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, The Snowman

“And a soft spot for the somewhat anguished officer with big ears that stuck out from the close-cropped cranium like two colourful butterfly wings. Even though Harry had caused Møller more trouble than was good for him. As a newly promoted PAS he had learned that the first commandment for a civil servant with career plans was to guard your back.”
― Jo Nesbø, The Redbreast

“The prosecutor nodded to the usher, who opened the door at the back of the room. There was a scraping of chairs outside, the door opened wide and a large man strolled in. Krohn noted that the man was wearing a suit jacket which was slightly too small, black jeans and large Dr Martens boots. The close-shaven head and the slim athletic body suggested an age somewhere around the early thirties – although the bloodshot eyes with bags underneath and the pale complexion with thin capillaries bursting sporadically into small red deltas pointed more in the region of fifty. ‘Police Officer Harry Hole?’ the judge asked when the man had taken a seat in the witness box.”
― Jo Nesbø, The Redbreast

“Politiets overvåkningstjeneste, or POT, the Security Service,”
― Jo Nesbø, The Redbreast

“Using the acronym PAS – the internal abbreviation for Politiavdelingssjef, the head of Crime Squad – particularly pleased him. Brandhaug sat down, winked at his old friend Kurt Meirik, the head of Politiets overvåkningstjeneste, or POT, the Security Service, and studied the others sitting round the table.”
― Jo Nesbø, The Redbreast

“Harry went closer and could see she was attractive. And there was something about the relaxed way she spoke, the way she looked him straight in the eye, that suggested that she was also self-assured. A professional woman, he guessed. Something requiring a cool, rational mind. Estate agent, head of a department in a bank, politician or something like that. Well-off at any rate, of that he was fairly sure. It wasn’t just the coat and the colossal house behind her, but something in the attitude and the high, aristocratic cheekbones. She walked down the steps as if walking along a straight line, made it seem easy. Ballet lessons, Harry thought.”
― Jo Nesbø, The Redbreast

“Kripos”
― Jo Nesbø, The Redbreast

“Politiavdelingssjef,”
― Jo Nesbø, The Redbreast

“Without any prior warning, the ground suddenly gave way. He had a falling sensation and he lost all sense of reality. There weren’t four colleagues sitting in front of him in an office, it wasn’t a murder case, it wasn’t a warm summer’s day in Oslo, no-one called Rakel and Oleg ever existed. He knew that this brief panic attack could be followed by others and he hung on by his fingertips. Harry lifted his mug of coffee and drank slowly while he collected himself. He determined that when he heard the sound of the mug being put down on the desk he would be back, here, in this reality.”
― Jo Nesbø, The Devil's Star