Beartown (Beartown, #1)

by Fredrik Backman

So now she sometimes calls her husband and children several times a day just to complain to them. To reassure herself that they’re still there.

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

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.

“Success is never a coincidence. Luck can give you money, but never success,”

because they’ve allowed him to. But Kevin’s mother will always remember what she sees through the rear window that Saturday, and how her son looks as he stands in the parking lot. On the biggest day of his life he is the loneliest boy on earth.

All she wishes is that each day were forty-eight hours long. But she’s not greedy, she’d be happy with thirty-six. She just wants to be able to have a drink and catch up with a TV show, is that really too much to ask? She just wants sufficient time to make a big enough blanket.

You don’t need to understand every aspect of the ice to love it, and you don’t have to love the town to feel proud of it.

trying to turn it into. A puck, two goals, hearts full of passion. Some people say hockey is like religion, but that’s wrong. Hockey is like faith. 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. It’s what you feel in your chest when the referee glides out to the center circle between two players, when you hear the sticks strike each other and see the black disk fall between them. Then it’s just between you and hockey. Because cherry trees always smell of cherry trees, whereas money smells of nothing.

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

The bass player laughs loudly, and the sound sings between the trees and hits Benji in his head as quickly as in his chest. Very few people have that effect. Very few people are tequila and champagne at the same time.

They will ask her about the alcohol and marijuana. They won’t ask about the bottomless terror that will never leave her. About this room with its record-player and posters, from which she will never really escape again. One blouse-button somewhere on the floor, and a sense of panic that will be with her forever. She sobs noiselessly beneath his body, and screams silently behind his hand.

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

“If I report this to the headmaster, he’ll have to suspend you. Maybe even expel you from school. And shall I tell you something, Benjamin? Sometimes I think that’s what you want. It’s as if you’re trying to prove to the whole world that there’s nothing in your life that you aren’t destructive enough to have a go at wrecking.”

When he looks you right in the eyes and says something, no matter what crap he may have done immediately before, you believe him.

how could anyone with an expensive espresso machine at home ever put up with that? You want to be a hockey coach? Get used to not having the things other people have. Free time, a family life, decent coffee. Only the toughest of men can handle this sport. Men who can drink terrible coffee cold, if need be.

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

If you disrupt that rhythm, you disrupt their music, because even the best musicians in the world hate being forced to play out of time, and once they’ve started it’s hard to stop. An object in motion wants to keep going in the same direction, and the larger a rolling snowball gets, the more of a fool you have to be to dare to stand in its path.

“Do you think he… or she… the child… do you think it will like hockey?” She kisses him. “It’s really hard to love you without loving hockey, Dave. And it’s really, really, really hard not to love you.”

“It’ll only get worse for you if you sit here,” she whispers. “I know,” Leo says. Her little brother sits down beside her and starts to eat. In a sea of stares, he seems unconcerned. “So why do it, then?” his big sister asks. Leo looks at her with their mother’s eyes. “Because you and I aren’t like them. We aren’t the bears from Beartown.”