Us Against You (Beartown #2)

by Fredrik Backman

we stick happy pictures up everywhere, but we never show the gaps in the photograph album, where everything that hurts is hidden away. The silent tears in darkened rooms.

There’s only one sort of whisky here, but several types of sorrow.

people will always choose a simple lie over a complicated truth, because the lie has one unbeatable advantage: the truth always has to stick to what actually happened, whereas the lie just has to be easy to believe.

many of our worst deeds are the result of our never wanting to admit that we’re wrong. The greater the mistake and the worse the consequences, the more pride we stand to lose if we back down.

He taught him that love isn’t enough.

When everything else is collapsing, you throw yourself into the only thing you know you can control, the only place you feel you know what you’re doing. Everything else hurts too much. So you go to work and hide there, the way mountain climbers dig holes in the snow when a storm hits.

If you want to know why people sacrifice everything for love, you have to start by asking how they fell in love.

Sometimes it doesn’t take anything at all for us to start loving something, just time.

It will take a long time for the young women to realize that he had the hammer with him because he knew Ana and Maya would need to be armed before they dared go with him. It can be an unbearable sorrow for someone to know that he’s regarded as such a wild animal in other people’s eyes.

‘a joy shared is a joy doubled,’ we seem to insist on believing that the opposite is true of sorrow. Perhaps that isn’t actually the case. Two drowning people with lead weights around their ankles may not be each other’s salvation;

‘One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.’

‘Grief is the price we pay for love, Ramona. A broken heart in exchange for a whole one.’

There’s a loser in every relationship. We may not like to admit it, but one of us always gets a little more and one of us always gives up a little more readily.

The marks on the wall will be like the grandchildren’s drawings other old men pin up on their fridges: tiny etchings in time to prove that someone we love grew up here.

‘But you have to be a good friend to the kids who haven’t got any friends. And you have to defend the ones who are weaker. Even when it’s hard, even when you think it’s a nuisance, even when you’re scared. You always have to be a good friend.’

It’s hard to care about people. Exhausting, in fact, because empathy is a complicated thing. It requires us to accept that everyone else’s lives are also going on the whole time. We have no pause button for when everything gets too much for us to deal with, but then neither does anyone else.

when reality is hell we need stories, because they make us feel that if we can just be best at one thing, perhaps everything else will turn and start to go our way, too.

When terrible things happen, most people become waves, but some people become rocks. Waves are tossed back and forth when the wind comes, but the rocks just take a beating, immovable, waiting for the storm to blow over.

The truth about most people is as simple as it is unbearable: we rarely want what is best for everyone; we mostly want what’s best for ourselves.

Why doesn’t David just apologize? Probably for the same reason that all of us commit all our stupidest mistakes: it’s hard to admit that we’ve been wrong. And the bigger the mistake, the harder it is.

Men are busy, but boys don’t stop growing. Sons want their fathers’ attention until the precise moment when fathers want their sons’. From then on we’re all doomed to wish that we’d fallen asleep beside them more often, while their head could still fit on our chest. That we’d spent more time sitting on the floor while they were playing. Hugged them while they still let us.

guys never think about light, it just isn’t a problem in their lives. When guys are scared of the dark, they’re scared of ghosts and monsters, but when girls are scared of the dark, they’re scared of guys.

We rarely take out our anger on those who deserve it; we just take it out on whoever is standing closest.

Anxiety. It’s such a peculiar thing. Almost everyone knows what it feels like, yet none of us can describe it. Maya looks at herself in the mirror, wonders why it can’t be seen on the outside.

Some people just have a core of sadness.

‘Why does everyone drink so much?’ Ana sobs instead. ‘Because it makes everything quiet,’ Benji replies honestly.

loneliness drives everyone to make bad decisions,

Our fantasy worlds always have consequences for other people’s realities.

Our spontaneous reactions are rarely our proudest moments. It’s said that a person’s first thought is the most honest, but that often isn’t true. It’s often just the most stupid. Why else would we have afterthoughts?

‘Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.’

How many chances do we get to love something that’s almost pointless entirely unconditionally?

Death does that to us, it’s like a phone call, you always remember exactly what you should have said the moment you hang up. Now there’s just an answering machine full of memories at the other end, fragments of a voice that are getting weaker and weaker.

The complicated thing about good and bad people alike is that most of us can be both at the same time.

It’s so easy to place your hope in people. To think that the world can change overnight. We demonstrate after an attack, we donate money after a disaster, we lay our hearts bare online. But for every step forward we take, we take an almost equally large step back. Seen over time, every change is so slow that it’s barely visible when it’s happening.

The path back to normal life is indescribably long once death has swept the feet out from under those of us who are left.

It’s so easy to get people to hate one another. That’s what makes love so impossible to understand. Hate is so simple that it always ought to win. It’s an uneven fight.