The collection / 83 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01c. 1981 AD

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.

Fredrik Backman / quote

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02c. 1981 AD

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.

Fredrik Backman / quote

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03c. 1981 AD

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.

Fredrik Backman / quote

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04c. 1981 AD

Never trust people who don't have something in their lives that they love beyond all reason.

Fredrik Backman / quote

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05c. 1981 AD

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. That is the reason why passion is worth something, not for what it gives us but for what it demands that we risk. Our dignity. The puzzlement of others and their condescending, shaking heads.

Fredrik Backman / quote

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06c. 1981 AD

Fredrik Backman / quote

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07c. 1981 AD

The children's hobbies aren't only the children's hobbies - the parents put just as many hours into them, year after year, sacrificing so much, paying out such huge amounts of money, that their significance eats its way even into adult brains. They started to symbolize other things compensating for or reinforcing the parents' own failures.

Fredrik Backman / quote

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08c. 1981 AD

You're the funniest thing she knows. That's why she always draws you in color.

Fredrik Backman / quote

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09c. 1981 AD

All marriages have their bad sides, because people have weaknesses. If you live with another human being you learn to handle these weaknesses in a variety of ways. For instance, you might take the view that weaknesses are a bit like heavy pieces of furniture, and based on this you must learn to clean around them. To maintain the illusion.

Fredrik Backman / quote

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10c. 1981 AD

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.

Fredrik Backman / quote

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11c. 1981 AD

Anita is small and colourless in her grey trousers, grey knitted cardigan, grey hair and grey skin. But ove notices that her face is slightly red-eyed and swollen. Quickly she wipes her eyes and blinks away the pain. As women of that generation do. As if they stood in the doorway every morning, determinedly driving sorrow out of the house with a broom.

Fredrik Backman / quote

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12c. 1981 AD

Life is a Curious Thing. Winter turns to spring and Parvaneh passes her driving test. Of teaches Adrian how to change tires. The kid may have bought a Toyota, but that doesn't mean he's entirely beyond help, Ove explains to Sonja when he visits her one Sunday in April. The he shows her some photographs of Parvaneh's little boy. Four months old and as fat as a seal pup. Patrick has tried to force one of those cell phone camera things on Ove, but he doesn't trust them. So he walks around with a thick wad of paper copies inside his wallet instead, held together by a rubber band. Shows everyone he meets. Even the people who work at the florist's,

Fredrik Backman / quote

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13c. 1981 AD

And in an apartment on the other side of town, everyone wakes up with a start when the hound in the first-floor flat, without any warning, starts howling. Louder and more heartrendingly than anything they have ever heard coming out of the primal depths of any animal. As if it is singing with the sorrow and yearning of an eternity of ten thousand fairy tales. It howls for hours, all through the night, until dawn. And when the morning light seeps into the hospital room, Elsa wakes up in Granny's arms. But Granny is still in Miamas.

Fredrik Backman / quote

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14c. 1981 AD

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.

Fredrik Backman / quote

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15c. 1981 AD

He was never able to properly explain what happened to him that day. But he stopped being happy.

Fredrik Backman / quote

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16c. 1981 AD

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.

Fredrik Backman / quote

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17c. 1981 AD

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.

Fredrik Backman / quote

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18c. 1981 AD

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.

Fredrik Backman / quote

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19c. 1981 AD

When it comes to terror, reality’s got nothing on the power of the imagination[.]

Fredrik Backman / quote

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20c. 1981 AD

You should choose your battles if you can, but if the battle chooses you then kick the sod in his fuse box!

Fredrik Backman / quote

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21c. 1981 AD

There are certainly a good number of alternatives to "shit," if you have a particular need to express such a feeling.

Fredrik Backman / quote

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22c. 1981 AD

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.

Fredrik Backman / quote

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23c. 1981 AD

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.

Fredrik Backman / quote

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24c. 1981 AD

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.

Fredrik Backman / quote

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