The Fifth Woman Quotes
"Only when she had read the letter to the end, did she start to cry."
"Autumn was already at hand, hovering unseen."
"The facts of the case were clear, easy to grasp, and utterly terrifying."
"She realised that she had done nothing but wait all these years."
"Everyone has rights, he had claimed, sometimes sobbing, sometimes enraged."
"Life is like a pendulum. It swings back and forth between pain and relief, endless, ceaseless."
"The desperate defeat that Hitler was subjected to by his treacherous generals."
"The profits were good, so the war was justified."
"They used a group of apes for target practice."
"The women Berggren wrote about were either dead or fleeing in panic."
"In my mind shrunken heads and impaled people go together."
"I can't imagine a normal motive – if there is such a thing for taking someone's life."
"A criminal investigation is like a construction site. Everything has to be done in the proper order or the building won’t hold up."
"Maybe these days he’s living his life in fear that the contents might be divulged."
"They could both be absentminded, but they knew how to concentrate if there was a task to be done."
"In Sweden today you can’t trust anybody. That’s what he said."
"Death always arrives at the wrong time – something is left undone."
"But there was nothing he could do. The grouse would never be finished."
"He belonged to a generation that was particularly ill-prepared to accept that death was always nearby."
"The worm hidden in the flower portends the flower’s death."
"Evil must be driven out with evil. Where there is no justice, it must be created."
"I wander around the world like a ship without a captain, forced to atone for someone else's guilt."
"Maybe joining the Foreign Legion was some kind of teenage dream he’d had."
"There was something about the planning that pointed to a single killer."
"The Sweden that was his, the country he had grown up in, was not as solid as they had thought."
"Every violent act had a meaning for the person who committed it."
"I can make myself insensitive to extreme cold or heat if necessary."
"The thought that came to him was quite simple. When there is an earthquake, people flee from the epicentre in a hurry."
"Suicides are fundamentally inexplicable to those who should have paid attention and understood what was happening."
"It was almost midnight when he turned off the light in his office. He stood there in the dark. It was still just a hunch, a vague fear deep inside his brain."
"I'm not remotely interested in your views. I just want to know who they were. And why they became mercenaries."
"The man who’s taking care of my children has to get home. I can’t ask her to stay any longer."
"In the light from the glow she studied her hand. It was steady."
"There’s so much I’ve been thinking about. About you and your father. I know so little."
"The collapse of the Eastern bloc had opened her eyes. In the impoverished Latvia there were islands of wealth, simple joys."
"It’s always been my experience that men and women pack suitcases in different ways."
"I don’t know what I’d say. We’ve talked about this before."
"I often wondered about why you were so close. Maybe it was envy, plain and simple."
"A generation is growing up right now, the children who are younger than you, who are going to react with even greater violence."
"I think it’s very odd that Runfeldt would pack for a trip to Africa without taking a single change of underwear."
"The hardest thing to comprehend was the possibility that the murderer might be a woman."
"Reality frozen, suspended. Nothing more would ever happen."
"The mood was broken by Nyberg stepping onto the jetty. Reality returned."
"A pungee pit, a man tied to a tree and strangled. And now a man tied up in a sack and drowned."
"The violence would get more widespread and more brutal."
"We’re not going to have vigilantes in Sweden. Here in Skåne or anywhere else in the country."
"Is this the way we want it to be? That you might be risking your life when you make a wrong turn?"
"A human being is an animal who lives to endure."
"A policeman is always a policeman, at least if you believe the rock throwers."
"If we can’t manage without extra help to do much more than we already are."
"Silence began wandering back and forth between Ystad and Riga."
"Everything means something, the question was what."
"Police work is a question of piecing together tentative solutions."
"Abused, maybe murdered women. A vast stretch of time arched like a vault over the whole thing."
"Everything seems to be possible. We can’t tell what is important and what isn’t."
"But I’m thinking of asking for a favour in return later on."
"We’re not entirely without blame for the way things have developed."
"The big problem is the gradual shift in what the police and the courts see as a crime."
"But I have strong doubts that a discussion of the citizen militia will have any effect on this."
"The assault was vicious, that’s something I can emphasise."
"He’s a good policeman. Doesn’t he know that?"
"Time was running out and Wallander tried to decide what they should do."
"For the time being they’d have to forget about Grundén."
"He couldn’t see Yvonne Ander. No women in uniform."
"The man had no face. He was just a name in a macabre notebook."
"Wallander sensed more than understood that she intended to throw him in front of the train."
"Grundén didn’t seem to understand what had happened to him."
"He had to talk to the conductor and ask whether Yvonne Ander was already on the train."
"Wallander was sitting in the mud. They couldn’t get him to stand up."
"Yvonne Ander is the first person I’ve ever met who is both intelligent and insane."