"You're the funniest thing she knows. That's why she always draws you in color."

"Just everything else, Mum. I just have everything else from you."

"And then Mum spoons the coffee a little as if she's having fantasies of flinging it in Britt-Marie's face. But in a controlled way."

"When it comes to terror, reality's got nothing on the power of the imagination."

"Death is a strange thing. People live their whole lives as if it does not exist, and yet it's often one of the great motivations for living. Some of us, in time, become so conscious of it that we live harder, more obstinately, with more fury."

"Humanity has many shortcomings, but none is stronger than pride."

"She just smiled, said that she loved books more than anything, and started telling him excitedly what each of the ones in her lap was about. And Ove realised that he wanted to hear her talking about the things she loved for the rest of his life."

"The children's hobbies aren't only the children's hobbies - the parents put just as many hours into them, year after year, sacrificing so much, paying out such huge amounts of money, that their significance eats its way even into adult brains. They started to symbolize other things compensating for or reinforcing the parents' own failures."

"All passion is childish. It's banal and naive. It's nothing we learn; it's instinctive, and so it overwhelms us. Overturns us. It bears us away in a flood. All other emotions belong to the earth, but passion inhabits the universe."

"One of the first things you learn as a leader, whether you choose the position of have it forced upon you, is that leadership is as much about what you don't say as what you do say."

"He is wearing a rugby shirt with numbers and a little man on a horse on his chest. Kent has told Elsa that this sort of shirt costs more than a thousand kronor, and Granny always used to say that those sorts of shirts were a good thing, because the horse functioned as a sort of manufacturer's warning that the shirt was highly likely to be transporting a muppet."

"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."

"Ove looks at the group assembled around him, as if he's been kidnapped and taken to a parallel universe. For a moment he thinks about swerving off the road, until he realises that the worst case scenario would be that they all accompanied him into the afterlife."

"Sometimes it's easier to go on living, not even knowing who you are, when at least you know precisely where you are while you go on not knowing."

"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."

"Until there are so many of them that no one dares to chase them anymore. Until they're an army in themselves. Because if a sufficient number of people are different, no one has to be normal."

"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?"

"He was never able to properly explain what happened to him that day. But he stopped being happy."

"It doesn't take long to persuade each other to stop seeing a person as a person. And when enough people are quiet for long enough, a handful of voices can give the impression that everyone is screaming."

"It's been six months since she died. But Ove still inspects the whole house twice a day to feel the radiators and check that she hasn't sneakily turned up the heating."

"People said Ove saw the world in black and white. But she was color. All the color he had."

"We have to do it for my mum's sake. Because I'm hoping that the last sorry will be to her."

"Winners have a tendency to be forgiven in this town."

"There are certainly a good number of alternatives to 'shit,' if you have a particular need to express such a feeling."

"Not all monsters look like monsters. There are some that carry their monstrosity inside."

"Ove gives the box a skeptical glance, as if it's a highly dubious sort of box, a box that rides a scooter and wears tracksuit pants and just called Ove 'my friend' before offering to sell him a watch."

"Maybe their sorrow over children that never came should have brought the two men closer. But sorrow is unreliable in that way. When people don't share it there's a good chance that it will drive them apart instead."

"Further to this, Ove has the cat's resentful stares to contend with. Something in its eyes reminds him of the way Sonja used to look at him."

"She laughed and laughed and laughed until the vowels were rolling across the walls and floors, as if they meant to do away with the laws of time and space. It made Ove feel as if his chest was slowly rising out of the ruins of a collapsed house after an earthquake. It gave his heart space to beat again."

"Because when you love someone very much, it's difficult to learn to share her with someone else."

"All people want to live dignified live, dignity just means something different to different people."

"He went through life with his hands firmly shoved into his pockets. She danced."

"Rune never said anything about it. But to anyone who had known him a long time, it was as if he grew a few centimetres shorter in the years that followed. As if he sort of crumpled with a deep sigh and never really breathed properly again."

"What is a community? It is the sum total of our choices."

"It's going to be a grand adventure and a fairy tale of marvels. But it's my fault that you'll find a dragon at the end, my darling knight."

"In the beginning the queen had been a courageous and fair-minded princess very much liked by all, but unfortunately she grew up and became a frightened adult, as adults tend to be. She started loving efficiency and avoiding conflict. As adults do."

"Men are what they are because of what they do, not what they say."

"Soccer forces life to move on. There's always a new match. A new season. There's always a dream that everything can get better. It's a game of wonders."

"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."

"Children need the lie to be brave enough to sleep in their beds, parents need it to be able to get up the next morning."

"A few years turned into more years, and more years turned into all years. Years have a habit of behaving like that."

"Never trust people who don't have something in their lives that they love beyond all reason."

"We thought she'd save him. We all hoped so much that she'd save him because it would have been like a fairy tale and when one had lived in the dark for so long it's very difficult not to believe in fairy tales."

"Mum is a perfectionist and Dad is a pedant and that was partly why their marriage didn't work so well, Elsa figures. Because a perfectionist and a pedant are two very different things."

"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."

"Everyone has a thousand wishes before a tragedy, but just one afterward."

"For the perpetrator, rape lasts just a matter of minutes. For the victim, it never stops."

"Because a time comes in every man's life when he decides what sort of man he's going to be: the kind who lets other people walk all over him, or not."

"And then it goes as with all anger attacks. They don't just consist of one anger, but of many. A long series of angers, flung into a volcano in one's breast until it erupts."

"Anita is small and colourless in her grey trousers, grey knitted cardigan, grey hair and grey skin. But ove notices that her face is slightly red-eyed and swollen. Quickly she wipes her eyes and blinks away the pain. As women of that generation do. As if they stood in the doorway every morning, determinedly driving sorrow out of the house with a broom."