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Fredrik Backman Quotes

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Famous Fredrik Backman Quotes

“Falling in love with a place and falling in love with a person are related adventures. At first we run around street corners giggling and explore every inch of each other’s skin, over the years we get to know every cobblestone and strand of hair and snore, and the waters of time soften our passion into unfailing love, and in the end the eyes we wake up next to and the horizon outside our window are the same thing: home.”

PeopleLoveHomePlaces
Book:The Winners
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“So after conferring with the waiter for about an hour, the two men managed to convince him it would be easier for him if halved the bill or they'd 'report him'. Obviously, it was a bit hazy exactly who would report whom for what, but eventually, with a certain amount of swearing and arm-waving, the waiter gave up and went into the kitchen and wrote them a new bill. In the meantime Rune and Ove, nodded grimly at one another without noticing that their wives, as usual, had taken a taxi home twenty minutes earlier.”

LoveFunnyLife And Living
Book:A Man Called Ove
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“«Querer a alguien es como mudarse a una casa —solía decir Sonja—. Al principio nos encanta la novedad, nos asombra a diario el hecho de que sea nuestro todo aquello, como si temiéramos que alguien pudiera entrar de pronto y avisarnos de que se ha cometido un grave error y que de ninguna manera podemos quedarnos a vivir en un sitio tan bonito. Pero a medida que pasan los años, se deteriora la fachada, la madera se resquebraja aquí y allá, y uno empieza a tenerle cariño a la casa no por su perfección, sino por todas las imperfecciones. Aprendemos a conocer sus ángulos y rincones. Cómo evitar que la llave se quede encajada en la cerradura cuando hace mucho frío. Qué listones del suelo son los que ceden bajo nuestro peso al pisarlos y el modo exacto en que hay que abrir las puertas del armario para que no crujan. Y son todos esos pequeños secretos los que la hacen tuya».”

LoveHomeAmorHogar
Book:A Man Called Ove
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“Ove and Sonja are not perfect, but they are a harmonious couple. According to others, Ove and his wife together are like night and day. It is evident that Ove is night. This comparison does not irritate him. Ove is always a sad and unsociable person. However, his wife always amuses herself. Sonja affirms that Ove is night, because he is too stingy to burn the sun. Ove wonders why Sonja wants to be with him. She likes all sorts of abstract things – music, books and all kinds of wonderful words. Ove is a man of action. He likes screwdrivers and oil filters. Despite their dissimilitude and different perception of life, this couple love and support each other, because there is esteem between them.”

LoveReal LoveCouple QuotesSupportive RelationshipA Man Called Ove
Book:A Man Called Ove
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“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.”

LoveLossSorrow
Book:My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
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“Of course that was just one of her many strange little habits and quirks: she put onion flakes on breakfast cereal and poured bearnaise sauce on popcorn, and if you yawned when she was next to you, she would lean forward and stick a finger in your mouth, just to see if she could pull it out again before you closed your mouth. Sometimes she put cornflakes in Jim's shoes, sometimes little bits of boiled egg and anchovies in Jack's pockets, and the looks on their face when they realized seemed to amuse her more and more each time she did it. That's the kind of thing you miss. That she used to do this, that she used to do that. She *was,* she *is.*”

LoveDeathLossQuirky
Book:Anxious People
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“There’s an immensity of love that bursts from your chest the first time you hear your child cry, every emotion you’ve ever felt is amplified to the point of absurdity, children open floodgates inside us, upward as well as down. You’ve never felt so happy, and never felt so scared. Don’t say “don’t worry” to someone in that position. You can’t love someone like this without worrying about everything, forever.”

LoveChildren
Book:The Winners
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“When Peter and Kira had their first child, Isak, Kira said to him, "This is what we are now. Everything else comes after this. First and foremost, we are parents!" Peter already knew that, of course. All parents know. It's not a voluntary process, it's an emotional assault; you become someone else's property the first time you hear your child cry. You belong to that little person now. Before everything else. So when something happens to your child, it never stops being your fault.”

LoveChildrenFamily
Book:Us Against You
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“Oh, those are all our very best moments, when we’re wasting our lives. It’s an act of magnificent rebellion to do meaningless things, to waste time, to swim and drink soda and sleep late. To be silly and frivolous, to laugh at stupid little jokes and tell stupid little stories. Or to paint big paintings, the biggest you can manage, and to try to learn to whisper in color. To look for a way to show other people: this was me, these were my humans, these were our farts. These were our bodies, and they were small, far too small, because they couldn’t contain all our love. That’s all of life. All we can hope for. You mustn’t think about the fact that it might end, because then you live like a coward, you never love too much or sing too loudly. You have to take it for granted, the artist thinks, the whole thing: sunrises and slow Sunday mornings and water balloons and another person’s breath against your neck. That’s the only courageous thing a person can do.”

LoveLifeHope
Book:My Friends
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“To love someone is like moving into a house," Sonja used to say. "At first you fall in love in everything new, you wonder every morning that this is one's own, as if they are afraid that someone will suddenly come tumbling through the door and say that there has been a serious mistake and that it simply was not meant to would live so fine. But as the years go by, the facade worn, the wood cracks here and there, and you start to love this house not so much for all the ways it is perfect in that for all the ways it is not. You become familiar with all its nooks and crannies. How to avoid that the key gets stuck in the lock if it is cold outside. Which floorboards have some give when you step on them, and exactly how to open the doors for them not to creak. That's it, all the little secrets that make it your home.”

Love
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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“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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