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“Never trust people who don’t have something in their lives that they love beyond all reason.”
You’re either born with that way of seeing or you aren’t.
There’s an obvious difference between the children who live in homes where the money can run out and the ones who don’t. How old you are when you realize that also makes a difference.
It’s easy for a child to fall in love with something if they’re told that they can be best at it, as long as they want it enough.
He’s seventeen years old, and his mom wakes him early by saying his full name. She’s the only person who uses it. “Benjamin.” Everyone else calls him Benji.
The boy with the most handsome face, the saddest eyes, and the wildest heart they’ve ever seen. His mom knows, because she married a man who looked just the same, and nothing but trouble lies ahead for men like that.
All adults have days when we feel completely drained. When we no longer know quite what we spend so much time fighting for, when reality and everyday worries overwhelm us and we wonder how much longer we’re going to be able to carry on. The wonderful thing is that we can all live through far more days like that without breaking than we think. The terrible thing is that we never know exactly how many.
But at a certain point in a person’s life you either sink or swim, and nothing really matters anymore. What else could they do to him now beyond this? Fuck them.
to have to give hockey back to Peter. There’s a thin line between living and surviving, but there’s one positive side effect of being both romantic and very competitive: you never give up.
Religion is something between you and other people; it’s full of interpretations and theories and opinions. But faith… that’s just between you and God.
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. Anything that grows closely enough to what it loves will eventually share the same roots. We can talk about loss, we can treat it and give it time, but biology still forces us to live according to certain rules: plants that are split down the middle don’t heal, they die.
We burn and bleed and cry, fully aware that the most the sport can give us, in the very best scenario, is incomprehensibly meager and worthless: just a few isolated moments of transcendence. That’s all. But what the hell else is life made of?
Very few people are tequila and champagne at the same time.
Violence is like whisky: children in homes that have too much of it grow up either full of it, or entirely without it.
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.
It starts with “she wanted it” and ends with “she deserved it.”
It doesn’t take long to persuade each other to stop seeing a person as a person. And when enough people are quiet for long enough, a handful of voices can give the impression that everyone is screaming.
There are damn few things in life that are harder than admitting to yourself that you’re a hypocrite.
“Keep your trap shut when I’m talking! Fucking men! YOU’RE the problem! Religion doesn’t fight, guns don’t kill, and you need to be very fucking clear that hockey has never raped anyone! But do you know who do? Fight and kill and rape?” Sune clears his throat. “Men?” “MEN! It’s always fucking men!”
He will remember thinking: “Of all the men in the world that I wouldn’t like to be, he’s the one I’d like to be least of all: the one who hurt that girl’s best friend.”
Sometimes life doesn’t let you choose your battles. Just the company you keep.
Benji isn’t like anyone else at all. How can you not love someone like that?
