“But then an old man was discovered impaled in a ditch, and once again his world had started crumbling away beneath his feet. He wondered how long he could keep this up.”

“He was so excessively polite that Wallendar suspected he had endured many humiliations in his life.”

“The forest has been growing for hundreds of years. Each time a child is born, a tree is planted. You could see from his tree how old a person was. The tall and thick tree trunks, which gave the most shade, belonged to people who had already returned to the spirit world. But the trees of the living and the dead stood in the same grove, sought their nourishment from the same soil and the same rain. They stood there waiting for the children that were not yet born, the trees that had not yet been planted. In that way the forest would grow, and the age of the village would be visible for all time. No one could tell from a tree whether someone was dead, only that he had been born.”

“in a rash moment he decided to lie his way to the truth. If he wasn't mistaken, Ellen Magnusson had had very little experience with the police. She would assume that they searched for the truth by being honest themselves. She was the one who would lie, not the police.”

“If a policeman is serious about his profession but says he has time, he lies.”

“‎The game had started. Everybody was assuring everybody else how reliable they were. In fact, nobody trusted anybody but themselves”

“To grow up is to wonder about things; to be grown up is to slowly forget the things you wondered about as a child.”