More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
He was a man of black and white. And she was colour. All the colour he had.
he decided that maybe her inability to be on time was not the most important thing.
And now she stood outside the station with his flowers pressed happily to her breast, in all that red cardigan of hers, making the rest of the world look as if it was made in greyscale.
‘Have a good day,’ the man behind the Plexiglas calls out behind him. ‘We’ll see,’ mutters Ove.
He believed so strongly in things: justice and fair play and hard work and a world where right just had to be right. Not so one could get a medal or a diploma or a slap on the back for it, but just because that was how it was supposed to be.
Ove spent most of yesterday shouting at Parvaneh that this damned cat would live in Ove’s house over his dead body. And now here he stands, looking at the cat. And the cat looks back. And Ove remains strikingly non-dead.
And now he doesn’t quite know how to carry on without the tip of her nose in the pit between his throat and his shoulder. That’s all.
Then he looks at the cat. The cat looks back at him. There’s a new wound down its flank. Blood in its fur again. ‘Nine lives won’t last you very long, will they?’ says Ove. The cat licks its paw and looks as if it’s not the sort of cat that likes to keep count.
he smiles at Ove, Ove can’t think of anything to do but nod back. As if wanting to clarify that while he has no intention of returning the smile, he is prepared to acknowledge receipt of it.
Two hours ago she didn’t know where the clutch was, now she’s irritated because he won’t let her squeeze into a narrow parking space.
‘All people want to live dignified lives, dignity just means something different to different people,’
Not that it’s so important to listen to the local news when you’re about to shoot yourself in the head, but Ove thinks there’s no harm in keeping yourself updated.
‘There are never lots of burglaries before the first burglary,’
But we are always optimists when it comes to time, we think there will be time to do things with other people. And time to say things to them.
Ove has brought along a blue plastic deckchair to push into the snow and sit on. This could take a while, he knows. It always does when he has to tell Sonja something she won’t like. He carefully brushes away all the snow from the gravestone, so they can see each other properly.
‘Loving someone is like moving into a house,’ Sonja used to say. ‘At first you fall in love with all the new things, amazed every morning that all this belongs to you, as if fearing that someone would suddenly come rushing in through the door to explain that a terrible mistake had been made, you weren’t actually supposed to live in a wonderful place like this. Then over the years the walls become weathered, the wood splinters here and there, and you start to love that house not so much because of all its perfection, but rather its imperfections. You get to know all the nooks and crannies. How
...more
We fear it, yet most of us fear more than anything that it may take someone other than ourselves. For the greatest fear of death is always that it will pass us by. And leave us there alone.
One of the most painful moments in a person’s life probably comes with the insight that an age has been reached when there is more to look back on than ahead.
When Parvaneh gives him a look studded with a long line of question marks and exclamation marks, the doctor sighs again in that way young doctors with glasses and plastic slippers and a stick up their bottom often do when confronted by people who do not even have the common bloody decency to attend medical school before they come to the hospital.
