The Winners (Beartown, #3)

by Fredrik Backman

It isn’t enough for things to go well for us, things also need to go to hell for them, only then can we be properly happy.

She turns around and stretches up on tiptoe and nips him on the cheek with her teeth, and his knees buckle. He’s biggest and strongest pretty much everywhere he goes, but no matter what other people might think, he knows that if the children were on the other side of a fire, she’d be quicker than him. She’s complicated and unruly and argumentative and really not very easy to please, but he loves her most of all for her brutally uncompromising protective instinct.

People say that age brings wisdom, but for most of us that really isn’t true, when we get old we’ve just accumulated more experiences, good and bad. The result is more likely to be cynicism than wisdom. When we’re young we know nothing about all the very worst that can hit us, which is just as well, because otherwise we’d never leave the house. And we would definitely never let go of those we love.

But she’s sitting in a pub in a city on the other side of the country and hockey sounds like… home. Bang. Bang. Bang. It sounds like being eight years old and holding her dad’s hand.

everything gets shut down in the forest, everyone moves to the big cities, even your own daughters.

People can bury so many of their loved ones during a lifetime and still get up the morning after, but something inside gets a bit heavier each time.