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Quotes by Swedish Authors
"All lines are gray in the dark."
"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."
"Why did this keep happening? Why her? Perhaps there was some pheromone certain people omitted, perceivable only on a wavelength unique to those individuals who preyed on them."
"Understanding did not provide solace or make the pain go away; in many ways, understanding was just more salt in the emotional wound. Ignorance allowed one to fight back with unfettered cruelty. Understanding inspired empathy, which led to guilt, as well as suffering.She looked at Gavin, supine, unconcerned, contented, and thought that perhaps there was something to being a sociopath. If you didn't have a heart, it couldn't be broken."
"So you thought you could shit and eat at the same time. How disgustingly convenient."
"A lot of people have it in for me. It's practically a school sport."
"There's a saying that you can't put a price on a human life, but that saying is a lie because we have. We have, and it's so much lower than you would think. Yes, human life has its price like anything else, and will continue to do so for as long as it doubles as a commodity."
"You will not mock me-and you will let me finish. I have owned and lost a kingdom, and I have battled death. I have been through all that, and I will not chase after you like some lovesick poet spouting verse. If you wish to call me yours, then you will have to act as if you are mine. On the front of surrender, there is no middle ground."
"Just because you don't like peanut butter doesn't necessarily mean you can't like . . . peanuts."
"All right, she said a little sarcastically. "I was going to assume you liked eating babies and sacrificing virgins, but I might as well ask, what do you do for fun?"I languish in sin, I replied in the same tone. "I take my babies rare, and my virgins over easy."
"It's possible to love your grandmother for years and years without really knowing anything about her."
"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."
"There was something delightfully intimate about the relationship between predator and prey."
"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."
"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."
"You would do well to guard your tongue, lest it be stricken from you."
"It's like an itch, isn't it? You can feel it in your throat. You want to scream for me."
"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'."
"She had come into the garden expecting summer roses and had instead been caught in a bank of twisted, thorny, frostbitten vines."
"If one has never known freedom, it is easy to be blind to the gridirons composing one's cell."
"That's how it started: a series of small hurts and excuses between two people that built up slowly, widening over time to form a vast and yawning divide."
"We don't have dealings. He just stalks me. I'm popular like that."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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