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Quotes by Swedish Authors
"Just everything else, Mum. I just have everything else from you."
"Those are my favorite kind of parts to do, just being a goofball and seeing how far you can go with something until you're just way out of line."
"Writing detective stories is about writing light literature, for entertainment. It isn't primarily a question of writing propaganda or classical literature."
"I wasn't a complete bastard. If she liked to think she saw good in me, if she wanted to take credit for it, I'd let her. She deserved that much."
"Presence is the capacity to be present for another person with an open heart and to be grounded in our inner being. It is to be present for another person as a supporting light, as a supporting presence " and simply to be present with another person can help."
"Acceptance is to love and embrace everything that we find within ourselves like a mother embraces her child."
"My basic profession is as an actor, and I have learnt much about life through working as an actor. Working as an actor is really a spiritual profession, since it means to create life on the stage. It means to play a role totally, while at the same time you know deep down inside yourself that you are not the role that you are playing. Working as an actor gave me early a spiritual discipline, which taught me a lot about awareness and meditation. Life is also about learning to play different roles, and learning to change between different roles with the same easiness that you change shirt."
"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."
"If you were my agent and I was making $10 million a movie and made four movies a year, that means you have a salary of $4 million."
"Friendship can only exist between persons with similar interests and points of view. Man and woman by the conventions of society are born with different interests and different points of view."
"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."
"A man with a so-called character is often a simple piece of mechanism; he has often only one point of view for the extremely complicated relationships of life."
"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."
"Turns out, I couldn't catch them - or even get close to them. I realized that sharks are amazing, beautiful animals who have absolutely no interest in checking me out."
"Emptiness and the not-"I is the quality that arises when the therapist consciously moves out of his own way without hindering the therapeutic process through his own ideas, attitudes, expectations and concepts. He is present, available and responds with the truth in the moment."
"Happiness consumes itself like a flame. It cannot burn for ever, it must go out, and the presentiment of its end destroys it at its very peak."
"Everything is worth precisely as much as a belch, the difference being that a belch is more satisfying."
"We should remember that there was once a discipline called natural philosophy. Unfortunately, this discipline seems not to exist today. It has been renamed science, but science of today is in danger of losing much of the natural philosophy aspect."
"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."
"He went through life with his hands firmly shoved into his pockets. She danced."
"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."
"Not all monsters look like monsters. There are some that carry their monstrosity inside."
"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."
"Our heart is the door to allowing Existence to guide us."
"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."
"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?"
"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."
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