The Winners (Beartown, #3)

by Fredrik Backman

Being married is easy, she usually thinks. You just pick an argument you’re really good at, then repeat it at least once a week for all eternity.

We fool ourselves that we can protect the people we love, because if we accepted the truth we’d never let them out of our sight.

They live in the same house but his parents barely see him, he’s fourteen now, meaning that they no longer have a child but a lodger.

he sat by Ramona’s bed and wept like a boy, and like a grown man. When we are little we grieve for the person we have lost, but when we’re older we grieve even more for ourselves. He wept for her loneliness, but also his own.

Not that Matteo is afraid of his parents, they’ve never hit him, their control over their children is of a different sort. Shame and guilt and disappointment, the Devil’s most effective tools.

In hockey we know who the winners are, because winners win.

He can’t help hoping that Bobo becomes a father, because he has all the best qualities for that: a big heart and a short memory.

It is often said that history is written by the winners, but there are no winners here.

just can’t imagine life without you now. We aren’t freshly blooming flowers, we’re two trees with intertwined roots, you’ve grown old within me.

She envies hockey supporters the way she envies deeply religious people: for their blind faith.

“Isn’t that what love is? Loving someone is one thing, but who the hell can bear being LOVED for twenty years?”

The very finest thing you can give a child is somewhere to belong. The biggest thing you can have is being part of something.

We will say in hindsight that boys like him commit their crimes because they want to feel powerful, but that isn’t right, he just wants to stop feeling powerless.

“Whether you’re forest folk or not has nothing to do with the forest,”

“You’re a hopelessly simple but horribly complicated person,”

Life goes on. It doesn’t give us any other choice.