He went through life with his hands firmly shoved into his pockets. She danced.
One morning you wake up with more life behind you than in front of you, not being able to understand how it’s happened.
The women glare at each other. Grin. You have friends when you’re fifteen years old. Sometimes you get them back.
Humanity has many shortcomings, but none is stronger than pride.
Soccer forces life to move on. There’s always a new match. A new season. There’s always a dream that everything can get better. It’s a game of wonders.
We have to do it for my mum’s sake. Because I’m hoping that the last sorry will be to her.
Sometimes it’s easier to go on living, not even knowing who you are, when at least you know precisely where you are while you go on not knowing.
At a certain age almost all the questions a person asks him or herself are really just about one thing: how should you live your life?
Just because you don’t like peanut butter doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t like . . . peanuts.
It’s strange how quickly the significance of of a certain smell can change, depending on what path it decides to take through the brain. It’s strange how close love and fear live to each other.
You can love something without loving everything about it. You don’t have to feel embarrassed about not being proud. That applies to hockey, but it also applies to friends.
Only a swine thinks size and strenght are the same thing.
Or that time she made a snowman in Britt-Marie and Kent’s garden right under their balcony and dressed it up in grown-up clothes so it looked as if a person had fallen from the roof.
What is a community? It is the sum total of our choices.
The worst thing about having power over other people’s lives is that you sometimes get things wrong.
One of the first things you learn as a leader, whether you choose the position of have it forced upon you, is that leadership is as much about what you don’t say as what you do say.
Don’t people get married because they’re full of love and then divorced when they run out of it?” (Elsa)”Did you learn that one in school?” (Mom)”It’s my own theory.” (Elsa)
Mum is a perfectionist and Dad is a pedant and that was partly why their marriage didn’t work so well, Elsa figures. Because a perfectionist and a pedant are two very different things.
The very worst events in life have that effect on a family: we always remember, more sharply than anything else, the last happy moments before everything fell apart.
There’s something quite special about a granny’s house. Even if ten or twenty or thirty years go by, you never forget how it smells.
Until there are so many of them that no one dares to chase them anymore. Until they’re an army in themselves. Because if a sufficient number of people are different, no one has to be normal.
Never trust people who don’t have something in their lives that they love beyond all reason.
All passion is childish. It’s banal and naive. It’s nothing we learn; it’s instinctive, and so it overwhelms us. Overturns us. It bears us away in a flood. All other emotions belong to the earth, but passion inhabits the universe.
You’re the funniest thing she knows. That’s why she always draws you in color.
Normal life is presentable. In normal life, you clean up the kitchen and keep your balcony tidy and take care of your children. It’s hard work–harder than one might think.
It’s been six months since she died. But Ove still inspects the whole house twice a day to feel the radiators and check that she hasn’t sneakily turned up the heating.
He was never able to properly explain what happened to him that day. But he stopped being happy.
The mightiest power of death is not that it can make people die, but that it can make people left behind want to stop living, she thinks, without remembering where she heard that.
Maybe their sorrow over children that never came should have brought the two men closer. But sorrow is unreliable in that way. When people don’t share it there’s a good chance that it will drive them apart instead.
Rune never said anything about it. But to anyone who had known him a long time, it was as if he grew a few centimetres shorter in the years that followed. As if he sort of crumpled with a deep sigh and never really breathed properly again.
When it comes to terror, reality’s got nothing on the power of the imagination[.]
You should choose your battles if you can, but if the battle chooses you then kick the sod in his fuse box!
There are certainly a good number of alternatives to “shit,” if you have a particular need to express such a feeling.
We thought she’d save him. We all hoped so much that she’d save him because it would have been like a fairy tale and when one had lived in the dark for so long it’s very difficult not to believe in fairy tales.
It’s going to be a grand adventure and a fairy tale of marvels. But it’s my fault that you’ll find a dragon at the end, my darling knight.
Further to this, Ove has the cat’s resentful stares to contend with. Something in its eyes reminds him of the way Sonja used to look at him.
… not all monsters look like monsters. There are some that carry their monstrosity inside.
And then it goes as with all anger attacks. They don’t just consist of one anger, but of many. A long series of angers, flung into a volcano in one’s breast until it erupts.
All people at root are time optimists. We always think there’s enough time to do things with other people. Time to say things to them. And then something happens and then we stand there holding on to words like ‘if’.
Because when you love someone very much, it’s difficult to learn to share her with someone else.
It’s possible to love your grandmother for years and years without really knowing anything about her.
People can turn into idiots if they’re alone for long enough. (Mum)
Just everything else, Mum. I just have everything else from you.
And then Mum spoons the coffee a little as if she’s having fantasies of flinging it in Britt-Marie’s face. But in a controlled way.
People said Ove saw the world in black and white. But she was color. All the color he had.
She goes silent. Ashamed of herself as mothers are when they realize they have passed that point in life when they want more from their daughters than their daughters want from them.
Men are what they are because of what they do, not what they say.
A few years turned into more years, and more years turned into all years. Years have a habit of behaving like that.
To teach her that not all monsters are in the beginning, and not all monsters look like monsters. Some carry their monstrosity inside.
Everyone has a thousand wishes before a tragedy, but just one afterward.
Ove gives the box a skeptical glance, as if it’s a highly dubious sort of box, a box that rides a scooter and wears tracksuit pants and just called Ove “my friend” before offering to sell him a watch.
Winners have a tendency to be forgiven in this town.
You only need one ray of light to chase all the shadows away.
Because a time comes in every man’s life when he decides what sort of man he’s going to be: the kind who lets other people walk all over him, or not.
It doesn’t take long to persuade each other to stop seeing a person as a person. And when enough people are quiet for long enough, a handful of voices can give the impression that everyone is screaming.
Everything is complicated if no one explains it to you.
She’s fifteen, above the age of consent, and he’s seventeen, but he’s still “the boy” in every conversation. She’s “the young woman”.Words are not small things.
For the perpetrator, rape lasts just a matter of minutes. For the victim, it never stops.
Grow up and be different and don’t let anyone tell you not to be different, because all superheroes are different.
Ana was a tornado. A jagged, hundred-sided peg in a community where everyone was supposed to fit into round holes.
And now she stood outside the station with his flowers pressed happily to her breast, in all that red cardigan of hers, making the rest of the world look as if it was made in greyscale.