Everyone is a hundred different things, but in other people's eyes we usually get the chance to be only one of them.
Fredrik Backman
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.
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.
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'.
I want someone to remember I existed. I want someone to know I was here.
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.
We want to be loved,' " quotes Britt-Marie. " 'Failing that, admired; failing that, feared; failing that, hated and despised. At all costs we want to stir up some sort of feeling in others. The soul abhors a vacuum. At all costs it longs for contact.' 
One morning you wake up with more life behind you than in front of you, not being able to understand how it's happened.
All roads lead to something you were predestined to do.
What an uncomfortable, terrible source of shame it is for the world that the victim is so often the one left with the most empathy for others.
If you hate the one who hates, you could risk becoming like the one you hate.
One of the most painful moments in a person's life probably comes with the insight that an age has been reached when there is more to look back on than ahead.
Bitterness can be corrosive. It can rewrite your memories as if it were scrubbing a crime scene clean, until in the end you only remember what suits you of its causes.
You never have the sort of friends you have when you're fifteen ever again. Even if you keep them for the rest of your life, it's never the same as it was then.
The love a parent feels for a child is strange. There is a starting point to our love for everyone else, but not this person. This one we have always loved, we loved them before they even existed. No matter how well prepared they are, all moms and dads experience a moment of total shock, when the tidal wave of feelings first washed through them, knocking them off their feet. It's incomprehensible because there's nothing to compare it to. It's like trying to describe sand between your toes or snowflakes on your tongue to someone who's lived their whole life in a dark room. It sends the soul flying.
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