Beartown (Beartown, #1)

by Fredrik Backman

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

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.

You never stop being scared of falling from the top, because when you close your eyes you can still feel the pain from each and every step of the way up.

Throughout their childhood Maya loved her best friend because she wasn’t like any other girl she had met, but life as a teenager seems to have acted like sandpaper on Ana. She’s getting smoother and smoother, smaller and smaller.

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.

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

“That most people don’t do what we tell them to. They do what we let them get away with.”

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

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