Fredrik Backman

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

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.

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.

In the beginning the queen had been a courageous and fair-minded princess very much liked by all, but unfortunately she grew up and became a frightened adult, as adults tend to be. She started loving efficiency and avoiding conflict. As adults do.

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.

Just because you don__ like peanut butter doesn__ necessarily mean you can__ like . . . peanuts.

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.

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?

She laughed and laughed and laughed until the vowels were rolling across the walls and floors, as if they meant to do away with the laws of time and space. It made Ove feel as if his chest was slowly rising out of the ruins of a collapsed house after an earthquake. It gave his heart space to beat again.

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.

Ana was a tornado. A jagged, hundred-sided peg in a community where everyone was supposed to fit into round holes.

Grow up and be different and don__ let anyone tell you not to be different, because all superheroes are different.

She__ fifteen, above the age of consent, and he__ seventeen, but he__ still __he boy_ in every conversation. She__ __he young woman_.Words are not small things.

For the perpetrator, rape lasts just a matter of minutes. For the victim, it never stops.

She is told all the things she shouldn__ have done: She shouldn__ have waited so long before going to the police. She shouldn__ have gotten rid of the clothes she was wearing. Shouldn__ have showered. Shouldn__ have drunk alcohol. Shouldn__ have put herself in that situation. Shouldn__ have gone into the room, up the stairs, given him the impression. If only she hadn__ existed, then none of this would have happened, why didn__ she think of that?

In Miamas, fairy tales are still produced around the clock, lovingly handmade one by one, and only the very, very finest of them are exported. Most are only told once and then they fall flat on the ground, but the best and most beautiful of them rise from the lips of their tellers after the last words have been spoken, and then slowly hover off over the heads of the listeners, like small, shimmering paper lanterns.

Everything is complicated if no one explains it to you.

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.