Anita is small and colorless in her gray trousers, gray knitted cardigan, gray hair and gray skin. But one 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.

— Fredrik Backman

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.

— Fredrik Backman

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?

— Fredrik Backman

Because a time comes in every man's life when he decides what sort of man he's going to be: the kind who lets other people walk all over him, or not.

— Fredrik Backman

Because when you love someone very much, it's difficult to learn to share her with someone else.

— Fredrik Backman

Death is a strange thing. People live their whole lives as if it does not exist, and yet it's often one of the great motivations for living. Some of us, in time, become so conscious of it that we live harder, more obstinately, with more fury.

— Fredrik Backman

Don't people get married because they're full of love and then divorced when they run out of it?" (Elsa)"Did you learn that one in school?" (Mom)"It's my own theory." (Elsa)

— Fredrik Backman

Everyone has a thousand wishes before a tragedy, but just one afterward.

— Fredrik Backman

Everything is complicated if no one explains it to you.

— Fredrik Backman

For the perpetrator, rape lasts just a matter of minutes. For the victim, it never stops.

— Fredrik Backman