Jo Nesbo Quotes

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.

Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?

Sometimes it seems unfair that events so old can reach forward through the years, sinking claws into one's life and twisting all that follows it. Yet perhaps that is the ultimate justice: we are the sum of all we have done added to the sum of all that has been done to us. There is no escaping that, not for any of us.

'Tis human actions paint the chart of time.

I considered that I had to write stories about the people I had met, with whom I'd worked, the history of my books - just in case I up and die.

History does influence our lives - every moment. We never sort of live our lives in a linear fashion. We always have these memories and these images from our past that sometimes we're not even aware of, and they sort of shape who we are.

Habits are the daughters of action, but then they nurse their mother, and produce daughters after her image, but far more beautiful and prosperous.

People can try to reinvent themselves. I don't think you can really change who you are, though, because who you are is pretty much where you came from and what you've done up to now.

Everybody's past and history informs them.

You are who you are at this moment because of everything that's ever happened to you, everything that you carried forward for yourself.

Any decision that I make, anything that I do, every single consideration of my day goes through the prism of what my former experience has been.

The idea that all we have is everything that's come before us, and we are the accumulated weight of our own personal histories, is a beautiful concept. And yet it also leaves you asking, 'Is that all there is? Is that all that defines us? Is that all we have?'

Nothing is more disgraceful than that an old man should have nothing to show to prove that he has lived long, except his years.

There was, really, nothing you could use as a blueprint for your life, except your past. There was no starting over. There was only picking up the pieces someone had left behind.

The seeds of the past bear fruit in the present.

Everybody has a background. Everybody has a past. Not everybody's the same person all the way through.

The marks humans leave are too often scars.

What man is, only his history tells.

Thousands of years of ideological, philosophical and practical decisions were made. They altered the surface of the earth, the coordinates of our souls. For every one of those decisions, maybe there's another decision that could have been made, should have been made.

I quite enjoy the lines on my forehead because they show my life. That’s my history and I like to see that in other people. Like this wrinkle is due to some girl who broke my heart. I don’t want to escape it in any way.

How much past there is in a life, however brief it be.

We are what we are because we have been what we have been.

Who we are in the present includes who we were in the past.

... we are the products of our past. ... a web of complexities.

If you really want to know how a person will operate, look at how they've lived their life.