The Talented Mr. Varg Quotes

“post hoc ergo propter hoc. In other words, there would be no causal”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Talented Mr. Varg

“Increasingly it seemed to him that everybody was sailing a bit close to the wind. The Sweden of his youth was an upright place, stiffened by a Lutheran code, firmly committed to a vision of a society that was egalitarian and supportive. Something had happened to that, and now you could make no assumptions as to the values that people would profess. Well, they had been all but exhausted by now, and all you had to do was to shake a tree and all sorts of things would fall out of the branches, including mixed metaphors.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Talented Mr. Varg

“it was only too easy to make somebody like Erik feel ill at ease. It was hard enough to be Erik, Ulf reflected, without having to fend off criticism from people like me. Ulf was a kind man, and even if Erik’s talk about fish was trying, he would take care not to show it. He would listen patiently, and might even learn something—although that, he thought, was rather unlikely.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Talented Mr. Varg

“Martin and I were enjoying our walk. He had spotted a couple of squirrels and had seen them off very convincingly—but humanely, you know: Martin never actually bites a squirrel. He warns them, and they scamper off.” Ulf smiled. “He’s good that way. I’ve always thought of Martin as a pacifist. I know that’s unusual for a dog, but I’ve always thought he doesn’t like violence.” He smiled again, as the thought occurred to him that dogs probably reflected their owners’ attitudes. South American dogs were perhaps a bit excitable; French dogs were fussy about their food; and Swiss dogs never got involved in other dogs’ scraps. Would it be possible ever to test such a theory? Psychologists engaged in all sorts of weird and wonderful research—there must be somebody who would look at this particular hypothesis, absurd though it sounded.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Talented Mr. Varg

“The afternoon was given over to sport, or to the appreciation of sport, as Ulf watched two football matches on the television, one after the other. They were scrappy and inconclusive games, marred by several ill-natured arguments with the referee. That always irritated Ulf, who felt that referees should be granted powers of arrest. If the police were waiting on the lines, and offenders could be seized and marched off to the cells, then there would be none of this bad behaviour, thought Ulf. As it was, these overpaid and over-indulged sportsmen could play to the gallery, parading their egos in displays of arrogance and petulance that held up the game unnecessarily. And as for those who deliberately sought to prolong a match for strategic reasons by feigning injury, they would soon abandon that if referees were allowed to count them out on the ground, just as the umpires of boxing matches could do. They would not have to count up to ten, thought Ulf: three would probably be enough to restore these sham casualties to rude health.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Talented Mr. Varg

“Use the last report,” Anna suggested. “Simply delete ‘efficiency’ or whatever and insert ‘restructuring.’ That will save you a great deal of time.” Ulf acknowledged the wisdom of this advice. “Restructuring” would go away, just as “efficiency” and “skills development” had gone away. But hoops had to be jumped through in order for this to happen, and Ulf would have to do that.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Talented Mr. Varg

“Memos descended fairly regularly from the Commissioner’s office, and they usually concealed an agenda. “Restructuring” was a current buzzword, having replaced “efficiency” and “skills development,” terms that had been the subject of the last two reports that the Department of Sensitive Crimes had been requested to submit. Each of these reports had taken two months to write and had disappeared into the maw of the police department without any sign of ever having been read by anybody. That was almost always the case with departmental reports, Ulf thought: People wrote them and submitted them. They then sat unread on several high-level desks before they were removed for filing. So it was, he suspected, throughout bureaucracies everywhere: people filled in forms and wrote reports that were rarely scrutinised and almost never led to anything happening in the real world.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Talented Mr. Varg

“A book on wind energy, Our Invisible Future, sat on a small pedestal, next to several titles on climate change. This book must be read by all those who use electricity, pronounced a handwritten placard below the book. Ulf raised an eyebrow. He used electricity, and was well disposed towards green energy, but did everyone have to read this?”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Talented Mr. Varg

“He read the krimis for pure entertainment; they amused him, sometimes to the point of open laughter, with their prolonged and sometimes absurd inaccuracy. None of them, he had noted, was written by an author with the slightest connection with crime, with the result that their portrayal of the life of detectives bore no relation, in Ulf’s view at least, to the reality faced by him and his fellow detectives. Every so often, of course, a real policeman, or possibly a criminal defence lawyer, set out to write a book dealing with crime. These books would usually be rich in detail and accurate enough, but also tended to be clumsily written: policemen and lawyers may be good at detecting criminals or defending them, but that did not make them masters of prose. These were and then books, as Ulf termed them: books in which the construction and then was used with breathless enthusiasm.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Talented Mr. Varg

“He had been looking in quite the wrong place-a place of darkness-when he should have been looking in a place of light.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Talented Mr. Varg

“one fewer personal world was about to be destroyed through the selfishness or inconstancy of another. That, at least, was cause for gratitude.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Talented Mr. Varg