Beartown (Beartown, #1)

by Fredrik Backman

If you are honest, people may deceive you. Be honest anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfishness. Be kind anyway. All the good you do today will be forgotten by others tomorrow. Do good anyway.

Grateful, grateful, grateful. That’s the role of mothers. But the role of children is to dream. So her son dreams that his mother will one day be able to walk into a room without having to apologize.

“You never have the sort of friends you have when you’re fifteen ever again. Even if you keep them for the rest of your life, it’s never the same as it was then.”

We love winners, even though they’re very rarely particularly likeable people. They’re almost always obsessive and selfish and inconsiderate.

She wonders what it would take for a woman to be the right kind of guy.

The lone she-wolf and the mother hen, doomed to envy each other.

he’ll go home and—deep down—will wish what we all wish whenever we leave something: that it’s going to collapse. That nothing will work without us. That we’re indispensible.

Few disappointments can compare with the way you feel the first time your best friend dumps you for a boy, and there’s no more silent walk than the one that takes you home alone after a party when you’re fifteen years old.

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.

“That’s how wars start. One side protects itself, so the other side has to protect itself even more, and then we start swapping our own fear with their threats. And then we start firing at each other.”