em (sparkles)’s Reviews > My Friends > Status Update

so she does what she usually does and quotes a poet: Tomas Transtromer:
"Don't be ashamed to be a human being— be proud! Inside you one vault after another opens endlessly. You'll never be complete, and that's as it should be."

"It was .. it was over twenty years ago."
"Not for ME! For me she died NOW!" Louisa snaps.
That's the worst thing with stories.
"For me too," Ted whispers.
And then Joar sits there under the stars and he too loses Ali all over again. That's the worst thing about death, that it happens over and over again. That the human body can cry forever.

"The biggest threat to men's health, statistically, is heart disease,"
Ted says thoughtfully at the kitchen table. "Do you know what the biggest threat to women's health is?"
"Men," Louisa says, because all women know that.

He looks out the window and recognizes where they are. The outlines of the town, and of himself, are growing clearer and clearer. It is probably never easy for anyone to return to the place where they grew up, there's no way to forget who you are there, no matter how hard you've tried to become someone else. But for Ted it's impossible to come home now, he realizes, because home was the people.

"Because he was in a hurry to show us something before the summer came to an end," Ted says, and his voice is both exultant and sad.
Both happy and unhappy. Because it's that sort of story, with that sort of ending.

"What do your friends think you should be when you get older?" -

"Teacher," he admitted.
His big brother nodded and said:
"If you go to university and become a teacher, I could imagine having kids. Because then my kids would have someone to look up to."
Ted drank his beer and replied:
"You're enough to look up to."
That was the first time his big brother had ever been told that. That he was enough.

She hadn't met his friends many times, yet she still knew all about them. When Joar was out of earshot, she had whispered to Ted: "He brags about all of you all the time!"
Ali heard that, unfortunately, and then she felt obliged to run and hit Joar really hard on the arm so he would hit her back. So that everyone would think that the tears in her eyes were because of that.

Some evenings the three of them all ate dinner like a normal family, and his old man would be attentive and charming, even funny. That was the worst thing Joar knew, when he heard one of the man's jokes and thought that that was where he had inherited his quick-wittedness from, because then he feared that he would get everything else too.

he tells her that the most evil thing about men like Joar's old man is that he wasn't evil all the time.

In the end Joar just couldn't bear it. In the end he was prepared to do anything just so he could stop feeling everything all the time.