Fredrik Backman

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.

You only need one ray of light to chase all the shadows away.

Winners have a tendency to be forgiven in this town.

I just mean ... damn ... this might sound a bit crazy, but sometimes you can't help wondering if we don't take all this a bit too seriously. If we aren't putting too much pressure on the juniors. They're not really much more than ... kids."..."That depends what we want from the kids. And what the kids want from hockey.

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.

He is wearing a rugby shirt with numbers and a little man on a horse on his chest. Kent has told Elsa that this sort of shirt costs more than a thousand kronor, and Granny always used to say that those sorts of shirts were a good thing, because the horse functioned as a sort of manufacturer__ warning that the shirt was highly likely to be transporting a muppet.

He had never heard anything quite as amazing as that voice. She talked as if she was continuously on the verge of breaking into giggles. And when she giggled she sounded the way Ove imagined champagne bubbles would have sounded if they were capable of laughter.

Everyone has a thousand wishes before a tragedy, but just one afterward.

To teach her that not all monsters are in the beginning, and not all monsters look like monsters. Some carry their monstrosity inside.

A few years turned into more years, and more years turned into all years. Years have a habit of behaving like that.

Men are what they are because of what they do, not what they say.

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.

Ove looks at the group assembled around him, as if he's been kidnapped and taken to a parallel universe. For a moment he thinks about swerving off the road, until he realises that the worst case scenario would be that they all accompanied him into the afterlife.

People said Ove saw the world in black and white. But she was color. All the color he had.

And then Mum spoons the coffee a little as if she__ having fantasies of flinging it in Britt-Marie__ face. But in a controlled way.

Just everything else, Mum. I just have everything else from you.

People in the real world always say, when something terrible happens, that the sadness and loss and aching pain of the heart will __essen as time passes,_ but it isn__ true. Sorrow and loss are constant, but if we all had to go through our whole lives carrying them the whole time, we wouldn__ be able to stand it. The sadness would paralyze us. So in the end we just pack it into bags and find somewhere to leave it.

People can turn into idiots if they're alone for long enough. (Mum)