More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
We love winners, even though they’re very rarely particularly likeable people. They’re almost always obsessive and selfish and inconsiderate. That doesn’t matter. We forgive them. We like them while they’re winning.
Hockey is a simple sport: when your desire to win is stronger than your fear of losing, you have a chance. No one wins when they’re frightened.
It doesn’t matter now. A young man left Beartown in silence and when he came home again it was too late for words. You can’t look a gravestone in the eye and ask its forgiveness.
All adults have days when we feel completely drained. When we no longer know quite what we spend so much time fighting for, when reality and everyday worries overwhelm us and we wonder how much longer we’re going to be able to carry on. The wonderful thing is that we can all live through far more days like that without breaking than we think. The terrible thing is that we never know exactly how many.
you never really stop fighting. You never stop being scared of falling from the top, because when you close your eyes you can still feel the pain from each and every step of the way up.
At night Kira still goes around the house, counting their children. One, two, three. Two in their beds. One in heaven.
Her colleague is single to the extreme, whereas Kira is fanatically monogamous. The lone she-wolf and the mother hen, doomed to envy each other.
A simple truth, repeated as often as it is ignored, is that if you tell a child it can do absolutely anything, or that it can’t do anything at all, you will in all likelihood be proven right.
A long marriage is complicated. So complicated, in fact, that most people in one sometimes ask themselves: ‘Am I still married because I’m in love, or just because I can’t be bothered to let anyone else get to know me this well again?’
he’ll go home and – deep down – will wish what we all wish whenever we leave something: that it’s going to collapse. That nothing will work without us. That we’re indispensable. But nothing will happen, the rink will remain standing, the club will live on.
What can the sport give us? We devote our whole lives to it, and what can we hope to get, at best? A few moments … a few victories, a few seconds when we feel bigger than we really are, a few isolated opportunities to imagine that we’re … immortal. And it’s a lie. It really isn’t important.’
‘The only thing the sport gives us are moments. But what the hell is life, Peter, apart from moments?’
Being a parent makes you feel like a blanket that’s always too small. No matter how hard you try to cover everyone, there’s always someone who’s freezing.
For years she used to go to bed dreaming of all the things she was going to do when she got older and had more time, and now she sometimes wakes up in despair in the middle of the night because she can no longer remember what those things were.
People say she’s gone mad, because that’s what people who know nothing about loneliness call it.
‘For me, culture is as much about what we encourage as what we actually permit.’ David asked what he meant by that, and Sune replied: ‘That most people don’t do what we tell them to. They do what we let them get away with.’
It’s often said that human beings are pack animals, and that thought is so deeply embedded that hardly anyone is prepared to admit that many of us are actually really rubbish at being in groups. That we can’t cooperate, that we’re selfish, or, worst of all, that we’re the sort of people other people just don’t like. So we keep repeating: ‘I’m a good team player.’ Until we believe it ourselves, without actually being prepared to pay the price.
Never again do you find friends like the ones you have when you’re fifteen years old.
That may have been how they survived, Kira realizes: thanks to their ability not to fall apart at the same time.
No social scientist nor any member of a sports team really knows what makes them who they are, the leaders we follow. Only that we don’t hesitate when we see them.
Hate can be a deeply stimulating emotion. The world becomes much easier to understand and much less terrifying if you divide everything and everyone into friends and enemies, we and they, good and evil.
The easiest way to unite a group isn’t through love, because love is hard. It makes demands. Hate is simple.
on the one hand, our entire species survived because we stuck together and cooperated, but on the other hand we developed because the strongest individuals always thrived at the expense of the weak. So we always end up arguing about where the boundaries should be drawn. How selfish are we allowed to be? How much are we obliged to care about each other?
‘One day, Zach, you’ll have more money and influence than all those bastards. And then you’ll do great things. Because you know how much it hurts to have no power. So you won’t hurt them, even though you could. And that will make the world a better place.’
There are few words that are harder to explain than ‘loyalty’. It’s always regarded as a positive characteristic, because a lot of people would say that many of the best things people do for each other occur precisely because of loyalty. The only problem is that many of the very worst things we do to each other occur because of the same thing.
