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Fredrik Backman Quotes

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Famous Fredrik Backman Quotes

“Ove could 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.”

FriendshipAngerArguments
Book:A Man Called Ove
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“The artist would remember being fourteen as feeling like he was always homesick, because he realized as an adult that that was what the emptiness in his chest was: some of us are born in the wrong place, the whole of our childhood is like being shipwrecked on a dessert island, we ache with homesickness without knowing what home is yet. That's all childhood friends are, people stuck on the same island. If you find a single one of them, you can cope with almost anything.”

LoveLifeFriendship
Book:My Friends
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“Marriage. There ought to be a different word for it once you've been married for enough years. When you've long since passed the point where it stopped feeling like a choice. I no longer choose you every morning, that was a beautiful thing we said on our wedding day, I just can't imagine life without you now. We aren't freshly blooming flowers, we're two trees with intertwined roots, you've grown old within me.”

LoveMarriage
Book:The Winners
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“How do you manage to have such a long marriage?' she asked. 'You fight for it,' Estelle replied honestly. Julia didn't seem to like that quite as much. 'That doesn't sound very romantic.' Estelle grinned knowingly. 'You have to listen to each other all the time. But not all the time. If you listen to each other all the time, there's a risk that you can't forgive each other afterward.”

MarriageListeningForgivenessComplex Relationship
Book:Anxious People
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“Hate can be a deeply stimulating emotion. The world becomes easier to understand and much less terrifying if you divide everything and everyone into friends and enemies, we and they, good and evil. The easiest way to unite a group isn't through love, because love is hard, It makes demands. Hate is simple. So the first thing that happens in a conflict is that we choose a side, because that's easier than trying to hold two thoughts in our heads at the same time. The second thing that happens is that we seek out facts that confirm what we want to believe - comforting facts, ones that permit life to go on as normal. The third is that we dehumanize our enemy.”

LoveHateEmotion
Book:Beartown
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