top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Swedish Authors
"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."
"Great things often start out small, and only open minds can perceive their inception."
"No one knows the future, but the present offers clues and hints on its direction."
"For us democracy is a question of human dignity. And human dignity is political freedom."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Just don't waste time trying to change what you can't."
"When we are authentic, when we act out of presence and awareness, it also gives nourishment to the inner being of people around us."
"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."
"Now, finally has the elevator arrived. The stairs was about to become a personal inferno."
"Nothing is finished unless it is started. So just start where you are."
"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."
"I can't think of a better way to revenge someone who tried to break you,Than to live and love life more without them."
"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."
"I have always felt deep within myself that I do not trust that I am already OK as I am, and that I do not trust that life takes care of me. But now I discover a silent place in the depth of my inner being, where I am already one with life, where I am OK as I am. It is also a silent inner place of healing and wholeness, where I can find a love and acceptance for that which is imperfect within myself."
"You want to be free. You also want to be mine. You can't be both."
"I tell her that the best thing to do when you fall is to get up,And she is up, so she's moving in the right direction."
"Silence is the source of healing. When we bring things from within ourselves out into the light of awareness, a healing process happens. In the silence, we can let go of all anger, sadness, fear, loneliness and frustration."
"People talk and people listen, but very few care enough to help."
"In life, most decisions are a case of let go to get."
"I'm strong beyond appearances reveal,But I'm human, and have weak moments still."
"As days are numbered and life is short, why waste days feeling bad for yourself?"
"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."
"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."
"When it comes to terror, reality's got nothing on the power of the imagination."
"You're the funniest thing she knows. That's why she always draws you in color."
"Laziness is when you accede to the misconception that work is unnecessary."
"Intuition is the art of the moment. Intuition is always in the moment, in the here and now. While the intellect always moves like the pendulum of a clock between the memories of the past and the fantasies of the future, intuition is always in the moment, always in the here and now. The more we develop our inner being, the inner source of love and truth, the inner quality of being here and now, the more we also have access to our intuition."
"Your heart is the roots to God.Your heart is nourished by truth, by God, but you have forgotten the heart.Come back to the heart, and you will be able to know the truth.You will be able to know the truth as the truth and the false as the false."
"I feel relieved, reborn, I'm me again.Free from heartbreak, that strong yet invisible chain,That stymied me from living again."
"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."
bottom of page