"Holland is a land of intense paradox. It is quite impossible, but it is there."

“Truth is the torch that gleams through the fog without dispelling it.”

“I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.”

“Northern Sweden holds a special kind of magic. It's cold, lonely, and the people are tough and silent, or so the stereotype says. This is Asa Larsson's home turf and I find as much joy in reading her closely observed descriptions of the environment, as in following her intriguing plots.”

Source : "Camilla Lackberg's top 10 Swedish crime novels" by Camilla Lackberg, www.theguardian.com. March 12, 2009.

“There are those rare people who function like human magnets, who are individually so attractive – or repellent, depending on the situation – that a considerable amount more seems to happen to them, and likewise, their presence in a certain place makes more seem to happen around them. They’re magical people. They have special power.”

“The key to effective giving is to stay open to receiving.”

“My part of the game is that I must live the best I can.”

“Often poetry, especially the sort of poetry I write, is concerned with looking at the borders between the sensual and the spiritual and seeing them as divided, equivocal, that mystery somehow can break in to the ordinary. And we read poetry I think in part, to gain a sense of that intimacy with things that we can't understand that are unable to be understood but that buoy up our lives.”

“Few are there that will leave the secure seclusion of the scholar's life, the peaceful walks of literature and learning, to stand out a target for the criticism of unkind and hostile minds.”