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Quote by Fredrik Backman

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A Man Called Ove

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Fredrik Backman

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“He feels again the sensation he has had all his life: that she is the other side to him, that they fit together, him and her, like two halves of a walnut. That without her he is incomplete, lost. He will carry an open wound, down his side, for the rest of his life, where she had been ripped from him. How can he live without her? He cannot. It is like asking the heart to live without the lungs, like tearing the moon out of the sky and asking the stars to do its work, like expecting the barley to grow without the rain.”

Book:Hamnet

“Insisting that life stay the same post-loss is essentially the same as saying, “Let’s just pretend this never happened.” That’s an incredible disservice to the person, place, or thing that you lost. Did you love what you lost? If you didn’t love it, was it important, significant, influential, or a large chunk of your life? Did you have hopes, dreams, or expectations attached to it? Then it’s worth grieving its loss. And that loss will change your identity on some level.”

“The territory of grief is heavy. Even the word carries weight. Grief comes from the Latin word 'gravis,' meaning 'heavy,' from which we also get grave, gravity and gravid. We use the word gravitas to speak of a quality in some people who are able to carry the weight of the world with a dignified bearing. And so it is, when we learn to carry our grief with dignity.”

“And Emily had yet to shed a single tear. It troubled her all the way back to the city, and she rode with one hand sandwiched between her cheek and the cool, shuddering glass of the limousine window, as if that might help. She tried whispering 'Daddy' to herself, tried closing her eyes and picturing his face, but it didn't work. Then she thought of something that made her throat close up: she might never have been her father's baby, but he had always called her 'little rabbit.' And she was crying easily now, causing her mother to reach over and squeeze her hand; the only trouble was that she couldn't be sure whether she cried for her father or for Warren Maddock, or Maddox, who was back in South Carolina now being shipped out to a division. But she stopped crying abruptly when she realized that even that was a lie: these tears, as always before in her life, were wholly for herself—for poor, sensitive Emily Grimes whom nobody understood, and who understood nothing.”