Quotes by Fredrik Backman

To love someone is like moving into a house," Sonja used to say. "At first you fall in love in everything new, you wonder every morning that this is one's own, as if they are afraid that someone will suddenly come tumbling through the door and say that there has been a serious mistake and that it simply was not meant to would live so fine. But as the years go by, the facade worn, the wood cracks here and there, and you start to love this house not so much for all the ways it is perfect in that for all the ways it is not. You become familiar with all its nooks and crannies. How to avoid that the key gets stuck in the lock if it is cold outside. Which floorboards have some give when you step on them, and exactly how to open the doors for them not to creak. That's it, all the little secrets that make it your home. " - Fredrik Backman , A Man Called Ove

He went through life with his hands firmly shoved into his pockets. She danced.

The women glare at each other. Grin. You have friends when you're fifteen years old. Sometimes you get them back.

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.

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.

Death is a strange thing. People live their whole lives as if it does not exist, and yet it's often one of the great motivations for living. Some of us, in time, become so conscious of it that we live harder, more obstinately, with more fury.

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.

Ove çould not in all honesty remember how it all started. It wasn't the sort of dispute where you did remember. It was more an argument where the little disagreements had ended up so entangled that every new word was treacherously booby-trapped, and in the end it wasn't possible to open one's mouth at all without setting off at least four unexploded mines from earlier conflicts. It was the sort of argument that had just run, and run, and run. Until one day it just ran out.

Only a swine thinks size and strenght are the same thing.

Around them, the dawn gently wakes Borg like someone breathing into the ear of someone they love. With sun and promises. Tickling light falls over warm duvets, like the smell of freshly brewed coffee and toasted bread. It shouldn't be doing this. It's the wrong day to be beautiful, but the dawn doesn't care.

The worst thing about having power over other people's lives is that you sometimes get things wrong.

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)

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.