The Deal of a Lifetime

by Fredrik Backman

Maybe all people have that feeling deep down, that 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.

Snow never lasts very long in Helsingborg. It’s the only place I know where the wind comes at an angle from below, like it’s frisking you.

What kind of adult doesn’t raise their kid to be terrified of a strange, forty-five-year-old, chain-smoking bloke who’s staring at her from a fire escape?

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.

But the vast majority of successful people don’t become bastards, we were bastards long before. That’s why we’ve been successful.

“You’re allowed to draw on the furniture when you have cancer,” the girl suddenly exclaimed with a shrug. “No one says anything.”

Every parent will take five minutes in the car outside the house from time to time, just sitting there. Just breathing and gathering the strength to head back inside to all of their responsibilities. The suffocating expectation of being good, coping.

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

I’m the person you think I am, the kind of person who says no when a dying five-year-old wants to play.

I’m the kind of person who doesn’t have any equals, I only have people above me that I want something from and people beneath me who I trample on.

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

failed with you. I tried to make you tough. You ended up kind.

Happiness is for children and animals, it doesn’t have any biological function.

if you give your life, it’ll disappear. You won’t die, you’ll never have existed. No one will remember you. You were never here.”

You humans always think you’re ready to give your lives, but only until you understand what that really involves. You’re obsessed with your legacy, aren’t you? You can’t bear to die and be forgotten.”

thought about the love in your hands. You’ve always touched the things you like as though they had a pulse.

“You’re not scared. You’re just grieving. No one tells you humans that your sorrow feels like fear.”