The Winners (Beartown, #3)

by Fredrik Backman

She’s in the last year of high school in Beartown, but she’s been an adult for a long time, the daughters of parents who take refuge in the bottom of bottles grow up faster.

he’s fourteen now, meaning that they no longer have a child but a lodger.

You have a job for your family’s sake and a career for your own.

the clientele just stare into their glasses even when they speak to one another, it’s the sort of place where it’s an act of mercy that there are no mirrors in the bathrooms.

No one tells you before you procreate that the hardest thing about being a good parent is that you never feel like one. If you’re absent you’re committing one big mistake, but if you’re present the whole time you commit a million tiny ones, and teenagers keep a count.

everything that happens in childhood is a postcard that parents send to themselves.

“Anyone who’s allergic to dust wouldn’t be able to lobotomize you.

Ramona has always had room in her heart for those who have succeeded in life, but the space she spares for those whose lives have gone to Hell will always be infinitely larger.

“Star Wars guys,” Ramona used to call them. “Show those films to a hundred men with a hundred different political opinions, and every damn one of them will think he’s Luke Skywalker.

the man is still wearing a suit and smart shoes, a gray man who gives the impression of having been sixty years old ever since he was fifteen.

“One gets more patriotic about where one is from the farther away from home one is.”

The forest wears down all illusions if it’s given long enough,

That was his only weapon, he defended his whole family from each other by using his heart as a shield.

The atmosphere in the locker room gradually became more jovial, because all muscles relax there, especially tongues.

As if her parents thought they could fool time by refusing to admit that it was passing.

“Anyone can learn to be an idiot, but an idiot can never learn anything at all,”

the day you think you’re a good dad is the day you’re a terrible dad.”

They talk at the same time, sisterhood’s capacity for simultaneity, neither of them ever has to shut up to hear what the other is saying.

She’s become harder, Maya thinks. Unless she’s just grown up. Unless she’s started closing doors and windows around all her feelings, because that’s what adults do, only children can live in emotional cross-winds.

He has been loved by them but he’s also been hated, the way only someone who has been loved can be,

Warriors are supposed to love other men, not fall in love with them.

his dad has disappeared deep inside himself and his mother is living inside postcards no one else can see.

Three boys without dads. If you want to know who Ramona was and what she really meant to this part of the world, you only have to look at the desolation in their faces.

Flattery is harder to withstand than a storm.

Mumble’s nods are more eager now. That also counts as a language.

In the kitchen Bobo is making dinner and asking questions, because his mother taught him that those are the two best ways of courting a girl: “Because girls aren’t used to either of them.”

He doesn’t know what she’s talking about, and nothing is more normal for a dad than that.

He has to sit there for a long time with weed in his lungs and childhood in his heart merely to check if he wants to go back,

Amat will remember this evening as the start of something. Bobo as the end of something. For Peter it feels like belonging to something again, for Mumble it feels like belonging to something for the very first time. For Big City it’s like getting a second chance to be a little kid and fall head-over-heels in love with hockey again. How it feels for Benji nobody knows, this is the last time they see him play.

All children are victims of their parents’ childhoods, because all adults try to give their kids what they themselves enjoyed or lacked.

We take happiness so easily for granted if we’ve had it from the start.

He has no family left in the world, but he has so much family in this town these days that he almost doesn’t have time to shout at them all.

You run on ahead.

they lie on their backs in the center circle, above the painted image of the bear, and the girl who is almost seven years old asks the boy who is barely twenty: “Do you hate God?” “Yes,” Benji replies honestly. “Me too,” she whispers.

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.

“No, no, he doesn’t know anything about hockey. He thinks it’s just a sport.”

“It’s easier to be anything if no one knows who you are. And it’s easier to be from Beartown the farther away from here you are.”

She’s forest folk too, it turns out. You don’t always know that until you have a forest to be folk in.

Those are the two shots that take Benji’s life. Both to the heart. What else could they have hit in there? He was all heart.