More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Elsa is the sort of child who learned early in life that it’s easier to make your way if you get to choose your own soundtrack.
She just wants Elsa to know she’s on Elsa’s side, no matter what. Because that’s what you do when you’re a granny and your grandchild’s parents get divorced and find themselves new partners
He dances his way through his existence.
Having a grandmother is like having an army. This is a grandchild’s ultimate privilege: knowing that someone is on your side, always, whatever the details. Even when you are wrong. Especially then, in fact. A grandmother is both a sword and a shield.
Because if you have a granny, your whole life is all-inclusive.
Granny says people who think slowly always accuse quick thinkers of concentration problems. “Idiots can’t understand that non-idiots are done with a thought and already moving on to the next before they themselves have. That’s why idiots are always so scared and aggressive. Because nothing scares idiots more than a smart girl.”
The house was as dark and silent as only Granny’s house could be without the presence of Granny, and it felt as if even the house were missing her.
Invisibility is the sort of superpower you can train yourself to have, and Elsa practices it all the time, but it doesn’t work if you are angry or frightened.
Granny was not the sort of person you had to call.
Even though she hates violence, she’s good at fighting because she’s had a lot of practice.
It’s possible to love your grandmother for years and years without really knowing anything about her.
But Granny was the sort of person you brought with you when you went to war, and that was what Elsa loved about her.
“Only different people change the world,” Granny used to say. “No one normal has ever changed a crapping thing.”
Because not all monsters were monsters in the beginning. Some are monsters born of sorrow.
Because not all monsters look like monsters. There are some that carry their monstrosity inside.
But when the real world crumbles, when everything turns into chaos, then people like Elsa’s granny can sometimes be the only ones who stay functional. That was another of her superpowers.
Because improbable tragedies create improbable superheroes.
“People can turn into idiots if they’re alone for long enough,”
“I think your grandmother functioned so well in chaotic places because she was herself chaotic. She was always amazing in the midst of a catastrophe. It was just all this, everyday life and normality, that she didn’t quite know how to handle.
“People shouldn’t have children if they don’t want to take care of them.”
“I taught myself to fix things on my own, that’s all. Because I didn’t trust your grandmother. In the end, things were even worse when she was actually here. I was angry at her when she was away, and even angrier when she was home.”
“All people who have seen war are broken.”
And then it goes as with all anger attacks. They don’t just consist of one anger, but of many. A long series of angers, flung into a volcano in one’s breast until it erupts.
It’s strange how quickly the significance of a certain smell can change, depending on what path it decides to take through the brain. It’s strange how close love and fear live to each other.
“Never mess with someone who has more spare time than you do,”
The mightiest power of death is not that it can make people die, but that it can make the people left behind want to stop living,
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.
the inner voices are those of the dead, coming back to help their loved ones.
your brain likes to make you look like an idiot.
Death’s greatest power is not that it can make people die, but that it can make people want to stop living.
And Elsa understands, the way you always understand such things when you see them in the eyes of those saying them, that he did not hide in the forests at the far reaches of the Land-of-Almost-Awake because he was afraid of the shadows, but because he was afraid of himself. Afraid of what they made him into in Mibatalos.
“Sometimes it’s hard to share one’s sorrow with people one doesn’t know.
“Don’t fight with monsters, for you can become one. If you look into the abyss for long enough, the abyss looks into you.”
You have to believe in something in order to understand the tales.
“Because I was afraid of everything when I was small. And she told me I should do what I was most afraid of. I should laugh at my fears.”
You’d quickly run out of people if you had to disqualify all those who at some point have been shits.
Granny then said the real trick of life was that almost no one is entirely a shit and almost no one is entirely not a shit. The hard part of life is keeping as much on the not-a-shit side as one can.
because the hearts of all living creatures are broken in war.”
“There’s this poem about an old man who says he can’t be loved, so he doesn’t mind, sort of, being disliked instead. As long as someone sees him,”
‘We want to be loved,’ ” quotes Britt-Marie. “ ‘Failing that, admired; failing that, feared; failing that, hated and despised. At all costs we want to stir up some sort of feeling in others. The soul abhors a vacuum. At all costs it longs for contact.’ ”
the people who reach the end of their days must leave others who have to live out their days without them. It is very, very difficult to be the one who has to stay behind and live without them.
For Mum may be Mum, but she is also Granny’s daughter.
I’m like Renault. I have a long braking distance,”
They laugh until no one can forget that this is what we leave behind when we go: the laughs.
“It’s hard for a parent to accept that you can’t protect your child from everything.” “It’s hard for a child to accept it too,”
There’s something quite special about a granny’s house. Even if ten or twenty or thirty years go by, you never forget how it smells.
To my knight Elsa. Sorry I have to dye. Sorry I dyed. Sorry I got old. Sorry I left you and sorry for this bloody cancer. Sorry I was a shit moor than a not-shit sometimes. I luv you more than 10000 eternities of fairytails. Tell Halfie the fairytails! And protect the castel! Protect your frends because they will protect you. The castel is yours now. No one is braver and wyser and stronger than you. You are the best of us all. Grow up and be diffrent and don’t let anyone tell you not to be diffrent, because all superheros are diffrent. And if they mess with you then kick them in the fusebox!
...more
Epilogues in fairy tales are also difficult. Even more difficult than endings. Because although they aren’t necessarily supposed to give you all the answers, it can be a bit unsatisfying if they stir up even more questions. Because life, once the story has ended, can be both very simple and very complicated.
And Maud bakes cookies, because when the darkness is too heavy to bear and too many things have been broken in too many ways to ever be fixed again, Maud doesn’t know what weapon to use if one can’t use dreams.
Because if a sufficient number of people are different, no one has to be normal.
