“The man lying on the sofa seemed friendly. But how friendly could he really be if he was a liar?
”

“Any religious person who says he does not really need human friends because God is his Friend is calling God a liar because He's the One Who says we also need human friends.”

“You could know a man not by what his friends said about him, but by how he treated his servants.”

“The line in the sand was drawn. A man did not sleep with his friend, especially not a man like him, one utterly incapable of caring for a woman outside of the bedroom. He couldn’t treat Cass that way. He would not touch the friend. No licking the friend, either. If he could get away with not looking at her, he’d do it.”

“Every man can tell how many goats or sheep he possesses, but not how many friends.”

“She was afraid that it was a moral issue, and that was one of his weaknesses. He was Salander’s friend. She knew her brother. She knew that he was loyal to the point of foolhardiness once he had made someone a friend, even if the friend was impossible and obviously flawed. She also the friend was impossible and obviously flawed. She also knew that he could accept any number of idiocies from his friends, but that there was a boundary and it could not be infringed. Where exactly this boundary was seemed to vary from one person to another, but she knew he had broken completely with people who had previously been close friends because they had done something that he regarded as beyond the pale. And he was inflexible. The break was for ever.”