Beartown (Beartown, #1)

by Fredrik Backman

“Never trust people who don’t have something in their lives that they love beyond all reason.”

“Culture” is an odd word to use about hockey; everyone says it, but no one can explain what it means. All organizations like to boast that they’re building a culture, but when it comes down to it everyone really only cares about one sort: the culture of winning. Sune is well aware that the same thing applies the world over, but perhaps it’s more noticeable in a small community. We love winners, even though they’re very rarely particularly likeable people. They’re almost always obsessive and selfish and inconsiderate. That doesn’t matter. We forgive them. We like them while they’re winning.

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.

A simple truth, repeated as often as it is ignored, is that if you tell a child it can do absolutely anything, or that it can’t do anything at all, you will in all likelihood be proven right.

A long marriage is complicated. So complicated, in fact, that most people in one sometimes ask themselves: “Am I still married because I’m in love, or just because I can’t be bothered to let anyone else get to know me this well again?”

This evening he’ll hold one of his last training sessions with the A-team, and when the season is over 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 indispensable. But nothing will happen, the rink will remain standing, the club will live on.

She remembers her own mother on those occasions, the way she would wipe the tears from her children’s cheeks and whisper: “No one ever said life was going to be easy.” Being a parent makes you feel like a blanket that’s always too small. No matter how hard you try to cover everyone, there’s always someone who’s freezing.

There are plenty of things that hurt people without people ever really knowing why. Anxiety can act as internal gravity, shrinking the soul.

People feel pain. And it shrinks their souls.

She assumes that all adults occasionally wonder about another life, one they could be living instead of the one they’ve got. How often they do so probably depends on how happy they are.

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.

Loneliness is an invisible ailment.

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.

Bitterness can be corrosive; it can rewrite your memories as if it were scrubbing a crime scene clean, until in the end you only remember what suits you of its causes.

It was only when he had to watch a game from the stands for the first time that he realized how close adrenaline is to panic. What rouses the body to battle and achievement are the same instincts that instill mortal dread in the brain.

doesn’t take a lot to be able to let go of your child. It takes everything.

It’s a terrible thing to have to keep a big secret from the people you love.

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.

Humanity has many shortcomings, but none is stronger than pride.

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

One of the many things snatched from the girl that night is the place where she never needed to feel afraid. Everyone has a place like that, until it gets taken away from us. You never get it back again.

The very worst events in life have that effect on a family: we always remember, more sharply than anything else, the last happy moment before everything fell apart. The second before the crash, the ice-cream at the gas station just before the accident, the last swim on holiday before we came home and received the diagnosis. Our memories always force us back to those very best moments, night after night, prompting the questions: “Could I have done anything differently? Why did I just go around being happy? If only I’d known what was going to happen, could I have stopped it?” Everyone has a thousand wishes before a tragedy, but just one afterward. When a child is born, its parents dream of it being as unique as possible, until it gets ill, when suddenly all they want is for everything to be normal.

One of all the terrible effects of grief is that we interpret its absence as egotism. It’s impossible to explain what you have to do in order to carry on after a funeral, how to put the pieces of a family back together again, how to live with the jagged edges. So what do you end up asking for? You ask for a good day. One single good day. A few hours of amnesia.

a few years’ time she’ll read an old newspaper article about research showing that the part of the brain that registers physical pain is the same part that registers jealousy. And then Ana will understand why she hurt so badly.

“For me, culture is as much about what we encourage as what we actually permit.” David asked what he meant by that, and Sune replied: “That most people don’t do what we tell them to. They do what we let them get away with.”

It’s often said that human beings are pack animals, and that thought is so deeply embedded that hardly anyone is prepared to admit that many of us are actually really rubbish at being in groups. That we can’t cooperate, that we’re selfish, or, worst of all, that we’re the sort of people other people just don’t like.

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

Words are small things. No one means any harm by them, they keep saying that.

One of the first things you learn as a leader, whether you choose the position or have it forced upon you, is that leadership is as much about what you don’t say as what you do say.

No social scientist nor any member of a sports team really knows what makes them who they are, the leaders we follow. Only that we don’t hesitate when we see them.

There’s always someone who’s worse. You can get almost anything to look normal if you make enough comparisons.

Perhaps it’s different when you’ve had to bury one of your own children, or perhaps all parents feel this way, but the only thing Kira has ever wanted for her kids was health, safety, and a best friend. You can get through anything then. Almost.

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. So the first thing that happens in a conflict is that we choose a side, because that’s easier than trying to hold two thoughts in our heads at the same time. The second thing that happens is that we seek out facts that confirm what we want to believe—comforting facts, ones that permit life to go on as normal. The third is that we dehumanize our enemy.

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.

Every child in every town in every country has at some point played games that are dangerous to the point of being lethal. Every gang of friends includes someone who always takes things too far, who is the first to jump from the highest rock, the last to jump across the rails when the train comes. That child isn’t the bravest, just the least frightened. And possibly the one who feels he or she doesn’t have as much to lose as the others.

Sooner or later, almost every discussion about the way people behave toward one another ends up becoming an argument about “human nature.” That’s never been an easy thing for biology teachers to explain: on the one hand, our entire species survived because we stuck together and cooperated, but on the other hand we developed because the strongest individuals always thrived at the expense of the weak. So we always end up arguing about where the boundaries should be drawn. How selfish are we allowed to be? How much are we obliged to care about each other? People say, “But what about a sinking ship? What about a burning house?” because those are dramatic scenarios to imagine. It’s hard to win a debate against that. Because if it were a life-and-death situation, who would you save if you could only choose one? Who would you pull out of the freezing water first if the lifeboat only had a limited number of places? Your family. You always start with your family.

There are damn few things in life that are harder than admitting to yourself that you’re a hypocrite.

Never again do you have the sort of friends you have when you’re fifteen.

it’s always easier to lecture other people about morality when you’ve never had to answer for anything yourself.

Sometimes life doesn’t let you choose your battles. Just the company you keep.

The love a parent feels for a child is strange. There is a starting point to our love for everyone else, but not this person. This one we have always loved, we loved them before they even existed. No matter how well prepared they are, all moms and dads experience a moment of total shock, when the tidal wave of feelings first washes through them, knocking them off their feet. It’s incomprehensible because there’s nothing to compare it to. It’s like trying to describe sand between your toes or snowflakes on your tongue to someone who’s lived their whole life in a dark room. It sends the soul flying.

There are few words that are harder to explain than “loyalty.” It’s always regarded as a positive characteristic, because a lot of people would say that many of the best things people do for each other occur precisely because of loyalty. The only problem is that many of the very worst things we do to each other occur because of the same thing.

Every day can mark a whole lifetime or a single heartbeat, depending on who you spend it with.

There are people who say that children don’t behave the way adults tell them to, but the way they see adults behave. Perhaps that’s true. But children live the way adults tell them to a fair bit as well.

This place has a way of grabbing hold of your insides that’s hard to explain. On the one hand, there’s all that’s bad about it—and that really is a very long list—but there are a few things that are so good that they manage to shine through the crap. The people, most of all.