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Sometimes people have to be allowed to have something to live for in order to survive everything else.
They’re adults now. For some girls that isn’t something you choose, it’s something that gets forced upon you.
What does it take to be a good parent? Not much. Just everything. Absolutely everything.
“Do you want boys or girls?” Ana replies as if she’s spent her whole life thinking about this, “Boys.” “Why?” “Because the world is kind of shitty toward them sometimes. But it treats us like that nearly all the time.”
The worst thing we know about other people is that we’re dependent upon them. That their actions affect our lives. Not just the people we choose, the people we like, but all the rest of them: the idiots. You who stand in front of us in every line, who can’t drive properly, who like bad television shows and talk too loud in restaurants and whose kids infect our kids with the winter vomiting bug at preschool. You who park badly and steal our jobs and vote for the wrong party. You also influence our lives, every second.
Lies are simple; truth is difficult.
Because their real problem isn’t that Kevin raped someone but that Maya got raped. If she hadn’t existed, it wouldn’t have happened. Women are always the problem in the men’s world.
Ramona looks on irritably for a while before putting a glass of beer down next to the plate. “On the house. You need to get some sort of nourishment inside you.” “I don’t drink alcohol,” the stranger says. “Nor do I, I’ve given up!” Ramona says, pouring herself another beer and hissing defensively, “This? Not even five percent alcohol! It’s practically milk!”
The best friends of our childhoods are the loves of our lives, and they break our hearts in worse ways.
“I hope you’re one of the people who gets a happy ending, Benji.”
that person has lived a life where morality is easy. It never is. Morality is a luxury.
“Do you want to hear something silly? You know you’re always telling me I’ll never find a girlfriend because my demands are too high? That’s your fault. Because I want someone who looks at me the way you and Dad look at each other.”
Lagrimas!!!!
It’s impossible to measure love, but that doesn’t stop us coming up with new ways to try. One of the simplest is space: How much space am I prepared to give the person that you are so that you can become the person you want to become?
“Everything is political. Everyone needs allies.”
“Have you had breakfast, boy? That’s the most important beer of the day. Probably good for the skin, too, full of vitamins.”
“Grief is the price we pay for love, Ramona. A broken heart in exchange for a whole one.”
💕🥺
Younger brothers never know what they put their big sisters through.
guys never think about light, it just isn’t a problem in their lives. When guys are scared of the dark, they’re scared of ghosts and monsters, but when girls are scared of the dark, they’re scared of guys.
“Us against the world,”
She wasn’t raped, she’s still being raped. For Kevin it lasted a matter of minutes, but for her it never ends.
It’s always the aggressors’ feelings we have to defend. As if they’re the ones who need our understanding.
Fatima arrives at the rink in Hed on her own, but she’s holding two tickets. She watches the game with an empty seat beside her, Ann-Katrin’s. When Amat comes out onto the ice, she stands up and cheers, and when Bobo comes out, she cheers twice as loudly. She’ll do that at every game Bobo plays and every game his younger siblings play. No matter where their lives take them, there’ll always be a crazy woman in the stands cheering loud enough for two.
“You may not be an angel, Benjamin. But, dear God, you haven’t suffered for the lack of a male role model. All your best qualities come from the fact that you’ve been raised in a house full of women.” Benji will always say she was wrong, because she made them sound like they were perfectly ordinary women. They aren’t, not to him. His sisters did their best to replace their father, they taught their little brother to hunt, drink, and fight. But they also taught him never to mistake friendliness for weakness or love for shame.
There are so many things Bobo ought to have asked her. Death does that to us, it’s like a phone call, you always remember exactly what you should have said the moment you hang up. Now there’s just an answering machine full of memories at the other end, fragments of a voice that are getting weaker and weaker.
The complicated thing about good and bad people alike is that most of us can be both at the same time.
“I refuse to be a victim. I’m a survivor.”
Theirs was a love we will always remember.
