Author: Fredrik Backman
We don’t have a plan, we just do our best to get through the day, because there’ll be another one coming along tomorrow.
He keeps them pressed at the same time for ten seconds he’ll be able to restore life to its factory settings.
‘Because it’s open plan! Otherwise the bank robber would never have been able to aim
At the end of your career you’re trying to find a point to it all, and at the start of it you’re looking for a purpose.
The older man thinks the most important thing is for a police officer to do the right thing, the younger thinks it’s more important to do things correctly.
Parents are defined by their mistakes.’
Your fingertips in the palm of my hand. Before you knew how many things I’d failed
She said you can’t protect your kids from life, because life gets us all in the end.’
We want to walk in their footsteps while they pursue our dreams.
He sometimes thinks it’s impossible to know if children end up completely different despite the fact that they grew up together, or precisely because of that.
Bank robber was thirty-nine, and had therefore reached an age where there’s suddenly very little difference between fourteen and twenty. That’s what makes a person feel old.
Sometimes it’s easier to live with your own anxieties if you know that no one else is happy, either.
I’ll interpret that as suggesting that it’s perfectly okay to have a binary attitude to intelligence.
whereas the police didn’t receive the call until the postman who had seen the bank robber in the stairwell called his wife, who happened to work in a café opposite the police station.
Yes. So I was surprised when I realized that I didn’t want to die. It came as a bit of a shock.
The most expensive thing you can buy in the most densely populated places on the planet is distance.’
Can you imagine what a bad parent you must have been for your children not to want to be parents?
“Now you’ll have to learn to cry in the cupboard, Jules, because children get frightened if you cry in front of them.”’
Parents also get frightened if kids cry in front of them.
Replied without thinking at all: ‘You love each other until you can’t live without each other. And even if you stop loving each other
‘You love each other until you can’t live without each other. And even if you stop loving each other for a little while, you can’t … you can’t live without each other.’
The following morning they were angry at the sun for rising, and couldn’t forgive the world for living on without her.
Nothing must happen to you No, what am I saying Everything must happen to you And it must be wonderful Julia will give Estelle a completely different type of literature in exchange.
Nothing must happen to you No, what am I saying Everything must happen to you And it must be wonderful
Somewhere, in some sort of heaven, Estelle will be listening to music with one man and talking about literature with another. She’s earned that.
They make it slow, bureaucratic, difficult to manoeuver. To stop the world lurching about too much. People need bureaucracy, to give them time to think before they do something stupid.’
We’re not going to die. We’re not going to die. We’re not going to die, you and I.
They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.