“Someone must lead the way.”

“Children get acquainted with each other in a special way, they do not make contracts as adults, they believe each other or not. Childish friendships often end in violence. You may become an enemy all of a sudden as well as notice that you are someone's best friend.”

“one must occasionally stand the world onits head in order to put it on its feet.”

“Every time Wallander stepped into someone's home, he felt as though he were looking at the front cover of a book that he had just bought”

“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.”

“Our exile organizations have been our way of replacing the cities and villages we have lost.”

“There’s always an end. But the end is always the beginning of something else. The periods we write into our lives are always provisional, in one way or another.”