And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer

by Fredrik Backman

One of my idols once said, “The worst part about growing old is that I don’t get any ideas anymore.” Those words have never quite left me since I first heard them, because this would be my greatest fear: imagination giving up before the body does.

so old now that people have given up and no longer nag him to start acting like an adult. So old that it’s too late to grow up. It’s

“We had too little time,” he says. She shakes her head. “We had an eternity. Children and grandchildren.” “I only had you for the blink of an eye,” he says. She laughs. “You had me an entire lifetime. All of mine.” “That wasn’t enough.”

“We’ll have plenty of chances to practice. You’ll be good at it. Almost all grown adults walk around full of regret over a good-bye they wish they’d been able to go back and say better. Our good-bye doesn’t have to be like that, you’ll be able to keep redoing it until it’s perfect. And once it’s perfect, that’s when your feet will touch the ground and I’ll be in space, and there won’t be anything to be afraid of.”

“I’m angry because you think everything happened by chance but there are billions of people on this planet and I found you so if you’re saying I could just as well have found someone else then I can’t bear your bloody mathematics!”

he spent an entire working life calculating probabilities and she was the most improbable person he ever met. She turned him upside-down.

“I wanted you to know,” he said as she stood barefoot in the grass that June and cried. “Know what?” she asked. “That equations are magic, and that all formulas are spells,” he said.

“You were never easy, darling difficult sulky you, never diplomatic. You might even have been easy to dislike at times. But no one, absolutely no one, would dare tell me you were hard to love.”

“Death isn’t fair.” “No, death is a slow drum. It counts every beat. We can’t haggle with it for more time.”

“We lived an extraordinarily ordinary life.” “An ordinarily extraordinary life.”

we’re not going into space because we’re afraid of aliens. We’re going because we’re scared we’re alone. It’s an awfully big universe to be alone in.’ ”