Beartown (Beartown, #1)

by Fredrik Backman

Sometimes the entire community feels like a philosophical experiment: If a town falls in the forest but no one hears it, does it matter at all?

“You can’t live in this town, Maya, you can only survive it.”

Why does Kira care about hockey? She doesn’t. She cares about a person who cares about hockey. And because she dreams of a summer—just one—when her husband can look his town in the eye without lowering his gaze.

You can’t look a gravestone in the eye and ask its forgiveness.

All that talent, all that sweat, all leading up to nothing but tears and bitterness in a man whose heart wanted so much more than his body could handle.

“You adorable stupid idiot, don’t you realize that’s when I fell in love with you? You were a lost little kid from the backwoods, but I knew that someone who was second-best in the country but was still crying because he was worried about disappointing the people he loved, that person was going to turn out to be a good man. He’d be a good father. He’d protect his children. He’d never let anything happen to his family.”

he still loves her the way you do when you’re a teenager, when your heart swells in your chest and makes you feel like you can’t breathe.

“The only thing the sport gives us are moments. But what the hell is life, Peter, apart from moments?”

We devote ourselves to sports because they remind us of how small we are just as much as they make us bigger.

People sometimes say that sorrow is mental but longing is physical. One is a wound, the other an amputated limb, a withered petal compared to a snapped stem.

For the perpetrator, rape lasts just a matter of minutes. For the victim, it never stops.

Never again do you find friends like the ones you have when you’re fifteen years old.

Words are not small things.

What an uncomfortable, terrible source of shame it is for the world that the victim is so often the one left with the most empathy for others.

It’s a clumsy gesture from a clumsy boy. Sometimes they’re worth the most.

This planet knows no greater silence than two dozen hearts after a loss.

Hate can be a deeply stimulating emotion. The world becomes much easier to understand and much less terrifying if you divide everything and everyone into friends and enemies, we and they, good and evil. The easiest way to unite a group isn’t through love, because love is hard. It makes demands. Hate is simple.

And when enough people are quiet for long enough, a handful of voices can give the impression that everyone is screaming.

“What can I do?” “Love me.” “Always, Pumpkin.”

Scream that she loves hockey. LOVES hockey! But she’s a girl, so what happens if she says that to a boy? He says: “Really? You’re a girl and you like hockey? Okay! Who won the Stanley Cup in 1983, then? Well? And who came seventh in the league in 1994? Well? If you like hockey you ought to be able to answer that!”

The most relatable statements known to sports loving women…

Fighting isn’t hard. It’s just hard to know when to throw the first punch.

Time always moves at the same rate, only feelings have different speeds. Every day can mark a whole lifetime or a single heartbeat, depending on who you spend it with.

You have friends when you’re fifteen years old. Sometimes you get them back.

There’s a hockey puck on a gravestone in Beartown. The writing is small, so that all the words can fit. Still the bravest bastard I know. Beside the puck lies a watch.

Because friendship is both complicated and not complicated at all.

“Now you’ll be scared of the dark, too, Kevin. For the rest of your life.”