“'What was that?' Wallander said.[Linda] 'Nothing.''That's funny. I could have sworn you were swearing.''I didn't say anything.''I have a strange daughter,' Wallander said to Lindman. 'She curses without even knowing it.'”

“Police work wouldn't be possible without coffee," Wallander said."No work would be possible without coffee."They pondered the importance of coffee in silence.”

“It's impossible to talk to a madman wisely, Wallander thought helplessly.”

“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”

“I'm a religious man," he said. "I don't believe in a particularGod, but even so one can have a faith, something beyondthe limits of rationality. Marxism has a large element ofbuilt-in faith, although it claims to be a science and notmerely an ideology. This is my first visit to the West: untilnow I have only been able to go to the Soviet Union orPoland or the Baltic states. In your country I see anabundance of material things. It seems to be unlimited. Butthere's a difference between our countries that is also asimilarity. Both are poor. You see, poverty has differentfaces. We lack the abundance that you have, and we don'thave the freedom of choice. In your country I detect a kind of poverty, which is that you do not need to fight for yoursurvival. For me the struggle has a religious dimension, andI would not want to exchange that for your abundance.”

“What doesn’t exist you have to create yourself. Even a dream can be plucked out of your head and shaped for a purpose.”

“Some people give theirselves a certain number of white weeks once in a year, when they do not drink a single drop of alcohol. It is really wise. I myself have a few weeks per year, let us call them white or black, when I am not interested in the world around. When I come back from this isolation of the news, I realize that I have missed nothing significant. We live in the rain of disinformation and rumors, where the truth is a very small number. In those weeks of dissociation I seek for knowledge that lies within me.”