Knife Quotes

“Happiness isn’t natural. Happiness is a trembling, exceptional state; seconds, minutes, days that you know simply can’t last. And sorrow at its absence doesn’t come afterwards, but at the same time. Because with happiness comes the terrible insight that nothing can be the same again, that you are already missing what you have, you’re worrying about the withdrawal pangs, grief at the loss, cursing the awareness of what you are capable of feeling.”
― Jo Nesbø, Knife

“You weren’t filling any sort of vacuum when we got together, but you left a huge, gaping hole when you went. There’s probably an argument that love is a process of loss.”
― Jo Nesbø, Knife

“But happiness is like heroin; once you’ve tasted it, once you’ve found out that happiness exists, you will never be entirely happy with an ordinary life without happiness again.”
― Jo Nesbø, Knife

“Recent research showed—in marked contrast to previous assumptions—that “talking things through” directly after a traumatic experience didn’t reduce the probability of developing PTSD, but the opposite.”
― Jo Nesbø, Knife

“And we’re all stuck in our ways. Bed-hoppers, thieves, drunks, murderers. We repeat our sins and hope for forgiveness, from God, other people, ourselves.”
― Jo Nesbø, Knife

“Photographs revealed more about the person who had hung them up than the images in them.”
― Jo Nesbø, Knife

“The pictures you chose to hang on the wall were fragments torn from life the way you wished it had been.”
― Jo Nesbø, Knife

“They say that the human brain’s ability to recognise patterns is what distinguishes us from animals, that our automatic, never-ending search for patterns repeating is what allowed our intelligence to develop and made civilisation possible.”
― Jo Nesbø, Knife

“Psychology and religion have one thing in common: to a large extent, they both give people what they want. Out there in the darkness, where the light of science has yet to reach, psychology and religion have free rein. And if they were to stick to what we actually know, there wouldn’t be jobs for all these psychologists and priests.”
― Jo Nesbø, Knife

“For every cigarette you smoke, God takes an hour away from you…and gives it to Keith Richards.”
― Jo Nesbø, Knife

“curled against his yellow teeth. ‘You need to breathe,”
― Jo Nesbø, Knife

“Why did you have to come and make me so lonely?”
― Jo Nesbø, Knife

“Harry had been happy. But happiness is like heroin; once you’ve tasted it, once you’ve found out that happiness exists, you will never be entirely happy with an ordinary life without happiness again. Because happiness is something more than mere satisfaction. Happiness isn’t natural. Happiness is a trembling, exceptional state; seconds, minutes, days that you know simply can’t last. And sorrow at its absence doesn’t come afterwards, but at the same time. Because with happiness comes the terrible insight that nothing can be the same again, that you are already missing what you have, you’re worrying about the withdrawal pangs, grief at the loss, cursing the awareness of what you are capable of feeling.”
― Jo Nesbø, Knife

“New research shows that dwelling on dramatic experiences before that increases the risk of long-term trauma.”
― Jo Nesbø, Knife

“and quoted Mark Greif, who had written an article in the New York Times saying that hipsters compensated for their lack of social and career achievements by trying to claim cultural superiority.”
― Jo Nesbø, Knife

“He thought about pattern recognition. They say that the human brain’s ability to recognise patterns is what distinguishes us from animals, that our automatic, never-ending search for patterns repeating is what allowed our intelligence to develop and made civilisation possible.”
― Jo Nesbø, Knife

“Madness is a lonely dialogue where we give ourselves the answers we want. And we’ve all had that conversation.”
― Jo Nesbø, Knife

“Then it was as if Harry’s smile suddenly shattered, like the morning ice in October, and Bjørn found himself looking into the black depths of desperate pain again. As if Harry had merely wanted to taste happiness. And had spat it out again.”
― Jo Nesbø, Knife

“While he was driving he had realised why he had left the knife between The Rainmakers and the Ramones. Simple. Rakel.”
― Jo Nesbø, Knife

“He inserted his hand between the eponymous albums The Rainmakers and Ramones to make space for the new acquisition.”
― Jo Nesbø, Knife

“On the shelves behind him—between The Rainmakers’ first album and Rank and File’s debut—he had both Ramones and his favourite, Rocket to Russia. Harry pulled the black vinyl disc out and put Road to Ruin on the turntable.”
― Jo Nesbø, Knife

“And—most memorably—when they were putting together the playlist of “songs that were at least forty years old by artists and bands from American states beginning with M.”
― Jo Nesbø, Knife

“He lay on the floor, crawled inside the lines, and curled up into the same fetal position, trying to stay within the white lines. And then, at last, he started to cry.”
― Jo Nesbø, Knife

“But happiness is like heroin; once you’ve tasted it, once you’ve found out that happiness exists, you will never be entirely happy with an ordinary life without happiness again. Because happiness is something more than mere satisfaction. Happiness isn’t natural. Happiness is a trembling, exceptional state; seconds, minutes, days that you know simply can’t last. And sorrow at its absence doesn’t come afterwards, but at the same time. Because with happiness comes the terrible insight that nothing can be the same again, that you are already missing what you have, you’re worrying about the withdrawal pangs, grief at the loss, cursing the awareness of what you are capable of feeling.”
― Jo Nesbø, Knife

“But happiness is like heroin; once you’ve tasted it, once you’ve found out that happiness exists, you will never be entirely happy with an ordinary life without happiness again. Because happiness is something more than mere satisfaction. Happiness isn’t natural.”
― Jo Nesbø, Knife

“hipsters compensated for their lack of social and career achievements by trying to claim cultural superiority.”
― Jo Nesbø, Knife

“Right up until he looked around at a Bon Iver concert and saw a thousand copies of himself, and realised that he belonged to a group, a group of people who more than any other—at least in theory—hate everything about belonging to a group. He was a hipster. As a hipster he hated hipsters, and especially male hipsters. There was something insubstantial, unmanly, about that dreamy, idealistic striving for the natural, the original, the authentic; about a hipster trying to look like a lumberjack who lived in a log cabin and grew and shot his own food, but who was still an overprotected little boy who thought modern life, quite rightly, had stripped away all his masculinity, leaving him with a feeling of being helpless”
― Jo Nesbø, Knife

“Why did he imagine that running was the opposite of drinking, that it was the antidote, when it merely gave him a different type of rush? But so what? It was a better rush.”
― Jo Nesbø, Knife

“Why did he imagine that running was the opposite of drinking, that it was the antidote, when it merely gave him a different type of rush?”
― Jo Nesbø, Knife

“Aune had a theory that killers didn’t read, or, if they did, only non-fiction.”
― Jo Nesbø, Knife