Beartown (Beartown, #1)

by Fredrik Backman

Which is why places like this always have to pin their hopes for the future on young people. They’re the only ones who don’t remember that things actually used to be better. That can be a blessing.

If you are honest, people may deceive you. Be honest anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfishness. Be kind anyway. All the good you do today will be forgotten by others tomorrow. Do good anyway.

What you create, others can destroy. Create anyway. Because in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and anyone else anyway.

In his world it takes more than hormones to turn boys into men.

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.

The worst thing about having power over other people’s lives is that you sometimes get things wrong.

‘Talent is like letting two balloons up into the air: the most interesting thing isn’t watching which one climbs fastest, but which one has the longest string,’

Sport creates complicated men, proud enough to refuse to admit their mistakes, but humble enough always to put their team first.

All that talent, all that sweat, all leading up to nothing but tears and bitterness in a man whose heart wanted so much more than his body could handle.

Trying to be the right kind of guy. Even if it’s impossible to be the right kind of mum at the same time.

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.

Hockey is like every other living organism: it has to adapt and evolve, or else it will die.

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?’

‘We’re bad losers, because a good loser is someone who’s used to losing!’

A great deal is expected of anyone who’s been given a lot.

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.

But at a certain point in a person’s life you either sink or swim, and nothing really matters any more.

‘That’s always the way with sons of fathers who liked whisky a little too much: you either drink it all the time or not at all. There’s no in-between in some families.’

‘Success is never a coincidence. Luck can give you money, but never success,’

parents always think their own expertise increases automatically as their child gets better at something. As if the reverse weren’t actually the case.

People sometimes say that sorrow is mental but longing is physical. One is a wound, the other an amputated limb, a withered petal compared to a snapped stem.

‘That most people don’t do what we tell them to. They do what we let them get away with.’