Top 50 John Ajvide Lindqvist Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “That’s how things are these days: everything must move aside to make room for the new, all the time.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

2. “No one thought of anything but themselves. My happiness, my future was the only thing you heard. Real love is to offer your life at the feet of another, and that’s what people today are incapable of.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

3. “Keep your relationships brief. Don’t let them in. Once they’re inside they have more potential to hurt you. Comfort yourself. You can live with the anguish as long as it only involves yourself. As long as there is no hope.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

4. “It is impossible to say why we love something or someone. We can come up with reasons if we have to, but the important part happens in the dark, beyond our control. We just know when it is there. And when it goes away.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

5. “This wasn’t the way he had expected his life to be. It worked, but that was about all. Happiness had got lost somewhere along the way.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

6. “Let the old dreams die. We have new ones.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

7. “But then, it’s probably different when you’re young.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

8. “What he was scared of was not that maybe she was a creature who survived by drinking other people’s blood. No, it was that she might push him away.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

9. “Real love is to offer your life at the feet of another.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

10. “When there’s nothing to see, when there are no thoughts, life comes instead.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

11. “A new life? There’s not such thing. It was only in the magazine headlines that people got a new life. Stopped drinking or taking drugs, found a new love. But the same life.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

12. “It was as if she lived only on clear, salty air, and when the day came for her to pass away, she would probably do exactly that. Just take a step to one side. Dissolve into a north-westerly wind as it whirled around the lighthouse at North Point, then out across the sea.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

13. “The most banal insights are often the most important. Like the realisation that we have one life, only one, and that we have to take care of it.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

14. “Let the right one in Let the old dreams die Let the wrong ones go They cannot do What you want them to do – Morrissey, “Let the Right One Slip In.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

15. “Mieux vaut se prendre une bite dans le trou de balle que de se faire trouer la peau par une balle.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

16. “A lot of screams for so little wool, said the man who sheared the pig.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

17. “Our fate is determined in rooms that must be easy to clean.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

18. “Please, dear God. Let her come back. You can have whatever you like. All my magazines, all my books, my things. Whatever you want. But just make it so she comes back. To me. Please, please God.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

19. “He didn’t want to scream anymore. Didn’t have the energy. The veils now covered his entire field of vision. He didn’t have a body any longer. The colors danced. He melted into the rainbow.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

20. “Just as the moon brought out the wolf in a werewolf, so alcohol brought this creature out of his dad.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

21. “Eli was new to him and therefore he had the opportunity to be someone else, say something different from what he said to other people. What.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

22. “If life is a prison, then there is a moment in a person’s life when she realizes exactly where her walls are located, where the boundaries to her freedom lie. Whether there are walls, or possible escape routes.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

23. “We are always in a certain amount of pain. There is chafing somewhere, and if it isn’t in our body, then it’s in our mind. There’s an itch, all the time.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

24. “She had felt a kind of sadness, looking at the spoons. Spoons that had been lying in their case for perhaps sixty years without anyone ever picking them up, holding them, using them.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

25. “The person his dad became when he drank had no connection to the person he was when he was sober. And so it was comforting to think about Dad being a werewolf. That he in fact contained a whole other person in his body. Just as the moon brought out the wolf in a werewolf, so alcohol brought this creature out of his dad.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

26. “He got up and left the bathroom. Didn’t wipe up the drop of blood. Let someone see it, let them wonder. Let them think someone had been killed here, because someone had been killed here. And for the hundredth time.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

27. “The membranes that separate us from insanity, from the fall, the monsters, are so thin. Only paper walls.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

28. “There was something vaguely menacing about the way the two children were moving behind the smiling, unsuspecting family. Like predators.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

29. “No respect for beauty – that was characteristic of today’s society. The works of the great masters were at most employed as ironic references, or used in advertising.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

30. “A graveyard could be so densely populated and yet it was the loneliest place on earth.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

31. “That’s how you should be. Accept your burden and carry it, with joy. That’s how you should be.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

32. “Speaking of 2001, I celebrated the turn of the millennium with Stefan and Karin. The so-feared computer crash did not occur.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

33. “But the simple fact of bearing a responsibility can be something that gives meaning to life.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

34. “When it comes to life, all you can change is the equivalent of furniture, paint and windows. Doors, maybe. Change the things that are in too bad a state and hope the core holds.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

35. “It was like a blackout in reverse. Since around nine o’clock, no lamps could be switched off, no electrical appliances powered down. If you tried to pull out the plug there was an alarming crackling sound and sparks flew between the outlet and the plug, preventing the circuit from being broken.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

36. “But Eva was not dead, he was not allowed to grieve. And she was not alive, so he could not hope. Nothing.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

37. “He thought “what the hell was that?” but didn’t have the energy to pursue it.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

38. “The orchestra strikes up with ‘Stockholm in My Heart’, and everyone joins in. Hands sway in the air, mobile phone cameras are raised. A wonderful feeling of togetherness. It will be another fifteen minutes until, with meticulous premeditation, the whole thing is torn to shreds. Let us sing along for the time being. We have a long way to go before we return here. Only when the journey has softened us up, when we are ready to think the unthinkable, will we be permitted to come back.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

39. “I have never met a couple with such integrity, such closeness as those two. They comprised their own little universe.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

40. “Viktor had been very sad about their grandfather’s death, but Flora had intuited that it was less the person he grieved for than the fact of death itself. Death meant that people actually disappeared. That everyone was going to disappear.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

41. “Perhaps what set the saints apart – the holy women and men – was that they held fast to what they had seen, not allowing their realisation to fade and die, but they held on, held on and refused to let go, saw forgetfulness as a tool of the devil and held on. Maybe this was the secret.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

42. “When there is emptiness all around us, and everything else has fallen away, it boils down to this and this alone: I have a life and you have a life, however different they may be. The question is: who has the power?”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

43. “Terror gave birth to terror, hatred begat hate and all that was left in the end was a pile of burnt bodies. As everywhere; as always.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

44. “The degree of satisfaction and relief lessened each time she opened a new wound, each time she drank a mouthful of her own rapidly thinning blood. Towards morning she was a whimpering mass of abstinence and anguish. Anguish because she knew what had to be done if she was to live.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

45. “Alle mennesker heter egentlig noe annet.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

46. “His thoughts refuse to grow, because they have nowhere to take root.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

47. “That’s how you should be. Accept your burden and carry it, with joy.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

48. “Why do we become what we become? The simple answer is that we are the sum of the choices we have made, the actions we have carried out. But why did we make those particular choices, carry out those particular actions? We have to go further and further back – like a child who keeps repeating ‘But why?’ – until we reach the maternity ward and what took place there.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

49. “Without our flaws we would be like a well-oiled machine, and our actions and thoughts could be predicted through simulation, if we only had sufficient processing power. That will never happen. Our flaws are a variable outside the scope of such a calculation, and they drive us to great achievements or to utterly despicable deeds.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

50. “Will I do?’ he asked. ‘You’ll do. In fact, you’ll more than do. Do you know which word suits you?’ ‘No.’ ‘It’s a beautiful word. You’re mysterious.”

— John Ajvide Lindqvist