Top 100 Jo Nesbo Quotes
#1. Ever since the '70s, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo were the godfathers of Scandinavian crime. They broke the crime novel in Scandinavia from the kiosks and into the serious bookstores.
Jo Nesbo
#2. He downed the rest of his drink and poured himself another from the bottle of whisky room service had brought up: Jameson. The only good thing ever to come out of Ireland.
Jo Nesbo
#3. The younger officer accompanying Waaler was learning something new every day. This afternoon, for example, he learned it was very stupid to rock on a chair while insulting someone, because you are totally defenseless if the insulted party steps over and lands a straight right between the eyes.
Jo Nesbo
#4. You know someone's okay if they can ignore things they can't do anything about and move on.
Jo Nesbo
#5. I just know that when I'm walking on the wafer-thin ice of happiness, I'm terrified, so terrified that I wish it was over, that I was already in the water.
Jo Nesbo
#6. The Stones are not the world's greatest band. Not even the world's second greatest band. What they are is the world's most overrated band. And it wasn't Keith or Mick who wrote "Wild Horses". It was Gram Parsons.
Jo Nesbo
#7. He went into the sitting room, put on a Duke Ellington record he had bought after seeing Gene Hackman sitting on the overnight bus in The Conversation to the sound of some fragile piano notes that were the loneliest Harry had ever heard.
Jo Nesbo
#8. When you go visiting countries, you start reading the history of the place and you start getting into the culture, and then you have to leave. In my experience, all countries have hidden treasures.
Jo Nesbo
#9. As usual, he had escaped into his work when his private life became too much of a burden. It was typical of a certain type of man, he had read.
Jo Nesbo
#10. Nybakk's shotgun in Oppsal was the easier option. Furthermore, a shotgun gave him more room to maneuver. To retrieve the rifle
Jo Nesbo
#11. Losing your life is not the worst thing that can happen. The worst thing is to lose your reason for living.
Jo Nesbo
#12. The brain works best between half past six and eleven. After that it's mush,
Jo Nesbo
#13. Christ, we're living in Sydney, the only town in the world where people are closet heteros.
Jo Nesbo
#14. What is worse? Taking the life of a person who wants to live or taking death from a person who wants to die.
Jo Nesbo
#15. An artist who maintains that he has been misunderstood is almost always a bad artist who, I'm afraid to say, has been understood.
Jo Nesbo
#16. . . we know . . . we . . . uh, what was that again?
Jo Nesbo
#17. They let the enemy build mosques in our midst, let them rob our old folk and mingle blood with our women. It is no more than our duty as Norwegians to protect our race and to eliminate those who fail us.
Jo Nesbo
#18. Listen, I am someone who had chosen to earn their daily bread killing other people. I'm inclined to give people a bit of leeway when it comes to their actions and decisions.
Jo Nesbo
#19. 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.
Jo Nesbo
#20. Harry lit up, drew the smoke deep into his lungs and tried to imagine the blood vessels in the wall of the lung greedily absorbing the nicotine. Life was becoming shorter and the thought that he would never stop smoking filled him with a strange satisfaction.
Jo Nesbo
#21. Then two identical Cadillac Fleetwoods (special Secret Service cars flown in from the US) and the President sitting in one of them. Which one was kept secret. Or perhaps he was sitting in both, Harry thought. One for Jekyll and one for Hyde.
Jo Nesbo
#22. I think my heart is quite selfish. If I followed my heart, I would not be a good person. But I have moral principles. I have to sit down and reflect.
Jo Nesbo
#23. Everyone knew that fat had become the new cancer, yet they bellyached about the dieting hysteria and applauded the "real" women's body. As though doing no exercise and being overfed was some kind of sensible mold.
Jo Nesbo
#24. Most of the water, however, did not run into the wall, but down it, because water, like cowardice and lust, always finds the lowest level.
Jo Nesbo
#25. If every baby was a perfect miracle, life was basically a process of degeneration.
Jo Nesbo
#26. Balance is of the essence,' she said. 'That appies to all good, harmonious relationships. Balance in guilt, balance in shame and pangs of conscience.
Jo Nesbo
#27. I feel more related to some American crime writers than I do to Stieg Larsson.
Jo Nesbo
#28. To err is human, to forgive is divine.
Jo Nesbo
#29. It was a sudden inspiration. But inspiration never came without a reason.
Jo Nesbo
#30. there were gods who needed to be worshipped and placated, and the currency for that was blood.
Jo Nesbo
#31. change of scene. A new start. And it worked.
Jo Nesbo
#32. There were those who asserted that sons always became, to some degree or other, disguised variants of their fathers, that the experience of breaking out was never more than an illusion; you returned; the gravity of blood was not only stronger than your willpower, it was your willpower.
Jo Nesbo
#33. We have this attitude that people become drug addicts against their will. That they couldn't possibly want this kind of life. But maybe that's not true. Maybe they don't want to live like other people - it just wouldn't suit them.
Jo Nesbo
#34. For many years, it seemed as if nothing changed in Norway. You could leave the country for three months, travel the world, through coups d'etat, assassinations, famines, massacres and tsunamis, and come home to find that the only new thing in the newspapers was the crossword puzzle.
Jo Nesbo
#35. Incomprehensible, his colleagues tended to say when they discovered young people who had chosen to take their own lives. Harry assumed they said that to protect themselves, to reject the whole idea of it. If not, he didn't understand what they meant by its being incomprehensible.
Jo Nesbo
#36. You get spoiled as a novelist because you get to be the director and the editor, and you play all the parts, but as a screenwriter, you are a bit down the ladder.
Jo Nesbo
#37. What was it Harry used to say? Intuition is only the sum of many small but specific things the brain hasn't managed to put a name to yet.
Jo Nesbo
#38. Are you dying?"
Cato lit his cigarette. "It's not acute, perhaps, but we're all dying, Harry.
Jo Nesbo
#39. But there is always a point where things can no longer be put off, where you can't be weak one more day and promise yourself that tomorrow, tomorrow you will start that other life.
Jo Nesbo
#40. [Rakel] It feels a bit like jumping out of a burning house. Falling is better than burning.
[Harry] At least until you land.
[Rakel] I've come to realize that falling and living have certain things in common. For a start, both are very temporary states of being.
Jo Nesbo
#41. All interesting heroes have an Achilles' heel.
Jo Nesbo
#42. Most likely because the majority of the receptionists have gone home, to a sick partner according to statistics, in the country with the shortest working hours in the world, the biggest health budget and the highest proportion of sick leave.
Jo Nesbo
#43. It's strange, but when your father has gone you suddenly discover that the choices you have made were as much for him as for yourself.
Jo Nesbo
#44. Just imagine walking away from something you've started. Something you really believed would be good. I don't think i could ever do that.
Jo Nesbo
#45. In traditional crime fiction every detective with any self-respect has an unfailing nose for when people are lying. It's bullshit! Human nature is a vast impenetrable forest which no one can know in its entirety. Not even a mother knows her child's deepest secrets.
Jo Nesbo
#46. Had kicked the chair away from underneath him. That's why he clawed his own neck
Jo Nesbo
#47. After the show the bar began to thin out. Birgitta
Jo Nesbo
#48. A personality disorder doesn't mean he is stupid. Sufferers are just as good, frequently better, at achieving their aims. What distinguishes them from us is that they want different things.
Jo Nesbo
#49. The truth we make for ourselves is just the sum of what is in someone's interest, balanced by the power they hold.
Jo Nesbo
#50. You can't see a person more nakedly than that, when they don't know they're being watched, studied.
Jo Nesbo
#51. What do we mean by 'crazy?' What do we mean by 'mad?' At what point is a person just different and at what point can we call it a disease and say that they are not responsible for their actions? Or are we all slaves to the chemical processes that go on in our brains?
Jo Nesbo
#52. Reason lives in the head, and faith in the heart. They're not always good neighbours.
Jo Nesbo
#53. I don't think I'll ever feel as famous or as popular as I felt when I was a 17-year-old soccer player in Modle. Only about 20,000 people live there and 12,000 of them come to every game. Running onto the pitch each week was just the most fantastic feeling. Nothing can beat that.
Jo Nesbo
#54. Harry had underrated intuition before, both other people's and his own, and it had been to his cost every time without exception.
Jo Nesbo
#55. Everyone has a need to do penance. It's a basic need, like washing. It's about harmony, an absolutely essential inner balance. It's the balance we call morality.
Jo Nesbo
#56. Don't, he thought. Don't let it happen. 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
Jo Nesbo
#57. Let me say here and now that faith has never done me any good, only doubt. So that is what has become my testament.
Jo Nesbo
#58. I think it's possible to learn. The problem is that we learn so damned slowly, so that by the time you've realized something, it's too late.
Jo Nesbo
#59. The social space between people who don't know each other is form one to three and a half metres. - Beate Lonne
Jo Nesbo
#60. In the supermarket Harry had bought a pizza grandiosa which he heated in the oven. He thought how odd it was to be sitting in Sweden, eating Italian food made in Norway.
Jo Nesbo
#61. Harry could feel his earlobes getting hot. How could this gay clown make him, a fully grown man, so embarrassed that he looked like a Brit after six hours on a Spanish beach?
Jo Nesbo
#62. All my friends who wanted to write had got nowhere trying to write the great European novel. So I deliberately steered clear of that and set out to write something story-led.
Jo Nesbo
#63. What determined the outcome of a life? A series of random events you had no control over, or did some cosmic gravity pull everything in the direction it was predestined to go?
Jo Nesbo
#64. Love's the sum total of all the little things you can never really put your finger on. Love surrounds you like steam in the shower. You can't see the individual drops but you get warm.
Jo Nesbo
#65. I have questioned myself about the brutality in the last few novels. Actually in 'The Leopard,' in hindsight, I feel I went a little bit too far with screaming blood. There are a couple of scenes that I regret and wish I had the chance to rewrite. 'Phantom' has less blood.
Jo Nesbo
#66. We're prisioners of... things.Of who we are.
Jo Nesbo
#67. I tell myself I write because I want to say something true and original about the nature of evil. That is very ambitious - to say something about the human condition that hasn't been written before. Probably I will never succeed but that is what I strive to do.
Jo Nesbo
#68. I'm working on a large project which I hope will become a book. A war book.' 'Hasn't someone already written that one?
Jo Nesbo
#69. There is nothing that makes a man grow beyond his stature than a woman telling him she loves him. and however much she might have lied to him, there will always be a part of him that is grateful to her for this, and that will harbour some love for her.
Jo Nesbo
#71. As a writer, you have to believe you're one of the best writers in the world. To sit down every day at the typewriter filled with self-doubt is not a good idea.
Jo Nesbo
#72. There was only one thing emptier than having lived without love, and that was having lived without pain.
Jo Nesbo
#73. Because the thought that we weren't happy at least for some time during our lives is unbearable. Adults
Jo Nesbo
#74. Rikshospital. He was in the rhythm now. Time was not chopped up by events; it flowed in an even stream.
Jo Nesbo
#75. When people use statistics, in 72% of cases, they've made them up on the spur of the moment. Katrine Bratt
Jo Nesbo
#76. Because we're the police,' Harry said. 'And not giggling concubines.
Jo Nesbo
#77. We're capable of understanding that someone has to drop an atomic bomb on a town of innocent civilians, but not that others have to cut up prostitutes who spread disease and moral depravity in the slums of London. Hence we call the former realism and the latter madness.
Jo Nesbo
#78. The statistical probability of being murdered in Norway was about one in ten thousand. When
Jo Nesbo
#79. He considered what he should do with the rest of his life. And he considered whether you ever found out if you had made the right decisions while you were still alive. It
Jo Nesbo
#80. In any conflict we instinctively take the side of those who look most like us.
Jo Nesbo
#81. Ceri loves Sci-Fi - " Game of Thrones "
also - Harry Hole , Lisbeeth Salander, Funky Scando Fiction, Supports Swans, Nirvana,
Jo Nesbo
#82. They're so rich and revered that they have neither electricity nor running water. Only social climbers have a sauna and a Jacuzzi.
Jo Nesbo
#83. My father grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., with my grandparents. In Norwegian my name is pronounced 'Yoo' but my father used to call me 'Joe.'
Jo Nesbo
#84. What we humans think we know is nothing compared to what we need to believe to numb the fear and pain.
Jo Nesbo
#85. He looked as if he was trying to set a new world record in being bored.
Jo Nesbo
#86. And, according to that Hume guy, the fact that I had until now woken up every morning in the same body, into the same world, where what had happened had actually happened, was no guarantee that the same thing would happen again tomorrow morning.
Jo Nesbo
#87. You also live in Holmenkollen?' 'Close by. Or quite close by. Bislett.
Jo Nesbo
#88. Everyone asks what the meaning of life is, but no one asks about the meaning of death.
Jo Nesbo
#89. A few days later Kurt called him to say that Harry Hole had been sent to the front, to some God-forsaken place in Sweden. Brandhaug had literally rubbed his hands with glee.
Jo Nesbo
#90. Fate. Hell and karma. It's what governs our lives.
Jo Nesbo
#91. You sound like someone who thinks he has to fight the whole world," Joseph said. "But if you don't drop your guard now and then, your arms will be too weary to fight.
Jo Nesbo
#92. Should a person be punished for showing no consideration towards an idiot behaving like an idiot?
Jo Nesbo
#93. No, of love. It's the same currency. Everything starts with love. Hatred is just the other side of the coin.
Jo Nesbo
#94. A son's responsibility isn't to be like his father, but to be better than him.
Jo Nesbo
#95. 'Phantom' was for me an interesting technique of telling the story. You have one voice that it is in the present telling what is happening, and then there's one voice from the past that's also driving the story forward. And you know that the two story lines will meet eventually.
Jo Nesbo
#97. Innocence walks hand-in-hand with ignorance. How insight never clarifies, only complicates.
Jo Nesbo
#98. Thanks to the success of Henning Mankell and Peter Hoeg, there wasn't the same stigma attached to writing genre thrillers in Scandinavia as there was in many other cultures. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Jo Nesbo
#99. A charming arsehole, isn't that what they're called?
Jo Nesbo
#100. We all drink according to how thirsty we are'.
Jo Nesbo
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