"It's strange how quickly the significance of of a certain smell can change, depending on what path it decides to take through the brain. It's strange how close love and fear live to each other."

"It's possible to love your grandmother for years and years without really knowing anything about her."

"And now she stood outside the station with his flowers pressed happily to her breast, in all that red cardigan of hers, making the rest of the world look as if it was made in greyscale."

"In Miamas, fairy tales are still produced around the clock, lovingly handmade one by one, and only the very, very finest of them are exported. Most are only told once and then they fall flat on the ground, but the best and most beautiful of them rise from the lips of their tellers after the last words have been spoken, and then slowly hover off over the heads of the listeners, like small, shimmering paper lanterns."

"You should choose your battles if you can, but if the battle chooses you then kick the sod in his fuse box!"

"Or that time she made a snowman in Britt-Marie and Kent's garden right under their balcony and dressed it up in grown-up clothes so it looked as if a person had fallen from the roof."

"Grow up and be different and don't let anyone tell you not to be different, because all superheroes are different."

"The mightiest power of death is not that it can make people die, but that it can make people left behind want to stop living, she thinks, without remembering where she heard that."

"I just mean ... damn ... this might sound a bit crazy, but sometimes you can't help wondering if we don't take all this a bit too seriously. If we aren't putting too much pressure on the juniors. They're not really much more than ... kids.'...'That depends what we want from the kids. And what the kids want from hockey."

"Just because you don't like peanut butter doesn't necessarily mean you can't like . . . peanuts."

"Normal life is presentable. In normal life, you clean up the kitchen and keep your balcony tidy and take care of your children. It's hard work-harder than one might think."

"Everything is complicated if no one explains it to you."

"There's something quite special about a granny's house. Even if ten or twenty or thirty years go by, you never forget how it smells."

"To teach her that not all monsters are in the beginning, and not all monsters look like monsters. Some carry their monstrosity inside."

"Around them, the dawn gently wakes Borg like someone breathing into the ear of someone they love. With sun and promises. Tickling light falls over warm duvets, like the smell of freshly brewed coffee and toasted bread. It shouldn't be doing this. It's the wrong day to be beautiful, but the dawn doesn't care."

"The worst thing about having power over other people's lives is that you sometimes get things wrong."

"Life is a Curious Thing. Winter turns to spring and Parvaneh passes her driving test. Of teaches Adrian how to change tires. The kid may have bought a Toyota, but that doesn't mean he's entirely beyond help, Ove explains to Sonja when he visits her one Sunday in April. The he shows her some photographs of Parvaneh's little boy. Four months old and as fat as a seal pup. Patrick has tried to force one of those cell phone camera things on Ove, but he doesn't trust them. So he walks around with a thick wad of paper copies inside his wallet instead, held together by a rubber band. Shows everyone he meets. Even the people who work at the florist's."

"She's fifteen, above the age of consent, and he's seventeen, but he's still 'the boy in every conversation. She's 'the young woman.Words are not small things."

"One morning you wake up with more life behind you than in front of you, not being able to understand how it's happened."

"You only need one ray of light to chase all the shadows away."

"You can love something without loving everything about it. You don't have to feel embarrassed about not being proud. That applies to hockey, but it also applies to friends."

"He had never heard anything quite as amazing as that voice. She talked as if she was continuously on the verge of breaking into giggles. And when she giggled she sounded the way Ove imagined champagne bubbles would have sounded if they were capable of laughter."

"All marriages have their bad sides, because people have weaknesses. If you live with another human being you learn to handle these weaknesses in a variety of ways. For instance, you might take the view that weaknesses are a bit like heavy pieces of furniture, and based on this you must learn to clean around them. To maintain the illusion."

"The women glare at each other. Grin. You have friends when you're fifteen years old. Sometimes you get them back."

"At a certain age almost all the questions a person asks him or herself are really just about one thing: how should you live your life?"

"Ana was a tornado. A jagged, hundred-sided peg in a community where everyone was supposed to fit into round holes."

"She goes silent. Ashamed of herself as mothers are when they realize they have passed that point in life when they want more from their daughters than their daughters want from them."

"Only a swine thinks size and strenght are the same thing."

"All people at root are time optimists. We always think there's enough time to do things with other people. Time to say things to them. And then something happens and then we stand there holding on to words like 'if'."

"People in the real world always say, when something terrible happens, that the sadness and loss and aching pain of the heart will 'lessen as time passes, but it isn't true. Sorrow and loss are constant, but if we all had to go through our whole lives carrying them the whole time, we wouldn't be able to stand it. The sadness would paralyze us. So in the end we just pack it into bags and find somewhere to leave it."