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Quotes by Swedish Authors
"What is their real problem? Is it the fear or is it what they do after feeling it?"
"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."
"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."
"It's possible to love your grandmother for years and years without really knowing anything about her."
"If a woman defined herself solely by the man she was with-and vice versa-the world would be a very shallow and insipid place, indeed."
"Máma was fond of saying that nothing tastes as good as skinny feels—an aphorism I was pretty sure she'd cribbed from the thinspiration sites she subscribed to online—but I believed that anyone who said such things had never tasted chili-cheese fries with melted cheddar, fresh ground beef, and Tapatío sauce."
"Happiness is such a fragile thing, isn't it? So easily burst, like a bubble blown by a child, and always on the verge of being carried away."
"There was something delightfully intimate about the relationship between predator and prey."
"Fuck, Christina."Yes, fuck Christina. I think she'd like that."
"I'd seen entire constellations of possibility I'd never previously been aware of, so blinded had I been by the bright, glaring stars of expectation. Freedom, I was beginning to think, had less to do with where you were, and was more about who you were trying to be."
"We both want you dead. I'm bringing the friendship bracelets to the next meeting."
"You would do well to guard your tongue, lest it be stricken from you."
"All lines are gray in the dark."
"I'm not going to force you into anything you don't want. But I'm also not going to take a vow of chastity and pine away for you, or whatever the hell it is that men do in romance novels these days. I have needs. I'd rather satisfy them with you, but if you don't want me I suppose I'll just have to find someone else. Might take me a while, but I'll make do. I always have before."
"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'."
"If one has never known freedom, it is easy to be blind to the gridirons composing one's cell."
"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."
"I am waltzing with death, flirting with him, but he stands there smiling and saying nothing because he does not need to woo or be wooed: he knows he gets us all in the end."
"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."
"You are my star and you have made me see, he tells her, "and I am the air beneath your wings, never rending, never ending."
"Girls can fight with swords, too. Sometimes, even better than men can. They just have to want it badly enough that they're willing to work harder at it."
"This softening she sees in me isn't enough to make me affectionate, but it's just enough to render me inept. I can't give her what she wants - virtuousness - or what she needs - protection."
"Did you think I'd only want you once? Oh, my, you are more naA ve than I thought. Why would I go through so much trouble for a mere tryst? Does a man ride a stallion but one time before condemning it to the abattoir?"
"Books make the best ersatz friendships."
"Words were the bane of her existence. She drowned in them when all she wanted was silence, only to have them recede when one desperately-sought phrase would be the key to her salvation. Most things were like that: excess in times of abundance, and shortages in times of dearth. Life, she realized, was an unbalanced scale, and would never weigh in one's favor, struggle as one might."
"It's like an itch, isn't it? You can feel it in your throat. You want to scream for me."
"What a joke, coming from a woman who worked for the fashion industry. Really. Starving yourself to fit into a size zero - why did that size even exist? Zero referred to the absence of something, but what did it mean in terms of a model's measurements? Her fat? Or her presence? How much could you cut away before the person herself vanished? It was hypocritical, that's what it was. I said as much, adding, "If you're so keen on me being healthy then you should have no problem accepting me for the way I am. That's what's healthy, Mom. Not being focused on all this freaky weight-loss stuff."
"Ana was a tornado. A jagged, hundred-sided peg in a community where everyone was supposed to fit into round holes."
"No. I made that choice. I let all that anger and pain get twisted up in my thoughts for you. He leaned in. "It fucking kills me. Every night. I relive what I did to you every night. His forehead rested against mine. "Until you, he said softly, "I never felt truly helpless."
"One morning you wake up with more life behind you than in front of you, not being able to understand how it's happened."
"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."
"Just because you don't like peanut butter doesn't necessarily mean you can't like . . . peanuts."
"We spend much of our lives going about completely blind to reality, and yet we still have the gall to act victimized when it invariably catches up to us."
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