The Deal of a Lifetime

by Fredrik Backman

your hometown is something you can never really escape, but can never really go home to, either. Because it’s not home anymore. We’re not trying to make peace with it. Not with the streets and bricks of it. Just with the person we were back then. And maybe forgive ourselves for everything we thought we would become and didn’t.

When five-year-old girls die, no one writes about that, there aren’t any memorials in the evening papers, their feet are still too small, they haven’t had time to make anyone care about their footsteps yet.

become bastards, we were bastards long before. That’s why we’ve been successful.

The only thing of value on Earth is time. One second will always be a second, there’s no negotiating with that.”

You were always someone who could be happy. You don’t know how much of a blessing that is.

“You never get your child’s attention back,” your mother once said. “The time when they don’t just listen to you to be nice, that time passes, it’s the first thing to go.”