Difficult questions, simple answers. What is a community?It is the sum total of our choices.
Fredrik Backman
Being a parent makes you feel like a blanket that's always too small. No matter how hard you try to cover everyone.
People have to tell their stories, Elsa. Or they suffocate.
She is told all the things she shouldn't have done: She shouldn't have waited so long before going to the police. She shouldn't have gotten rid of the clothes she was wearing. Shouldn't have showered. Shouldn't have drunk alcohol. Shouldn't have put herself in that situation. Shouldn't have gone into the room, up the stairs, given him the impression. If only she hadn't existed, then none of this would have happened, why didn't she think of that?
An unreasonable amount of paperwork is required these days just to be a human being.
The worst thing we know about other people is that we're dependent upon them. That their actions affect our lives. Not just the people we choose, the people we like, but all the rest of them: the idiots. You who stand in front of us in every line, who can't drive properly, who like bad television shows and talk too loud in restaurants and whose kids infect our kids with the winter vomiting bug at preschool. You who park badly and steal our jobs and vote for the wrong party. You also influence our lives, every second.
Sometimes people have to be allowed to have something to live for in order to survive everything else.
Death does that to us, it's like a phone call, you always remember exactly what you should have said the moment you hang up.
Granny and Elsa used to watch the evening news together. Now and then Elsa would ask Granny why grown-ups were always doing such idiotic things to each other. Granny usually answered that it was because grown-ups were generally people, and people are generally shits. Elsa countered that grown-ups were also responsible for a lot of good things in between all the idiocy - space exploration, the UN, vaccines and cheese slicers, for instance. Granny then said the real trick of life was that almost no one is entirely a shit and almost no one is entirely not a shit. The hard part of life is keeping as much on the 'not-a-shit' side as one can.
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.
Anything that grows closely enough to what it loves will eventually share the same roots. We can talk about loss, we can treat it and give it time, but biology still forces us to live according to certain rules: plants that are split down the middle don't heal, they die.
There's something special about a grandmother's house. You never forget how it smells.
A human being may not choose her circumstances, but she does choose her actions
When it comes to terror, reality's got nothing on the power of the imagination[.]
You have to understand that when one is just standing there looking, then just for a second one is ready to jump. If one does it, one dares to do it. But if one waits, it'll never happen.
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