anku > anku's Quotes

“It was a spring day, the sort that gives people hope: all soft winds and delicate smells of warm earth. Suicide weather.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“People in the real world always say, when something terrible happens, that the sadness and loss and aching pain of the heart will “lessen as time passes,” but it isn’t true. Sorrow and loss are constant, but if we all had to go through our whole lives carrying them the whole time, we wouldn’t be able to stand it. The sadness would paralyze us. So in the end we just pack it into bags and find somewhere to leave it.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“Only different people change the world,” Granny used to say. “No one normal has ever changed a crapping thing.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“Death’s greatest power is not that it can make people die, but that it can make people want to stop living.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“Because not all monsters were monsters in the beginning. Some are monsters born of sorrow.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises

“Having a grandmother is like having an army. This is a grandchild’s ultimate privilege: knowing that someone is on your side, always, whatever the details.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“I want someone to remember I existed. I want someone to know I was here.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“We want to be loved,’ ” quotes Britt-Marie. “ ‘Failing that, admired; failing that, feared; failing that, hated and despised. At all costs we want to stir up some sort of feeling in others. The soul abhors a vacuum. At all costs it longs for contact.’ ”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“One day at a time. One dream at a time. And one could say it’s right and one could say it’s wrong. And probably both would be right. Because life is both complicated and simple. Which is why there are cookies.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“Having a grandmother is like having an army. This is a grandchild's ultimate privilege: knowing that someone is on your side, always, whatever the details. Even when you are wrong. Especially then, in fact. A grandmother is both a sword and a shield.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“... not all monsters look like monsters. There are some that carry their monstrosity inside.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“Don’t fight with monsters, for you can become one. If you look into the abyss for long enough, the abyss looks into you.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“Granny and Elsa used to watch the evening news together. Now and then Elsa would ask Granny why grown-ups were always doing such idiotic things to each other. Granny usually answered that it was because grown-ups were generally people, and people are generally shits. Elsa countered that grown-ups were also responsible for a lot of good things in between all the idiocy – space exploration, the UN, vaccines and cheese slicers, for instance. Granny then said the real trick of life was that almost no one is entirely a shit and almost no one is entirely not a shit. The hard part of life is keeping as much on the ‘not-a-shit’ side as one can.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises

“People who have never been hunted always seem to think there’s a reason for it. ‘They wouldn’t do it without a cause, would they? You must have done something to provoke them.’ As if that was how oppression works.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises

“When it comes to terror, reality’s got nothing on the power of the imagination.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“Granny then said the real trick of life was that almost no one is entirely a shit and almost no one is entirely not a shit. The hard part of life is keeping as much on the not-a-shit side as one can.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“It's strange how close love and fear live to each other.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“Elsa is the sort of child who learned early in life that it's easier to make your way if you get to choose your own soundtrack.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“Granny says people who think slowly always accuse quick thinkers of concentration problems. “Idiots can’t understand that non-idiots are done with a thought and already moving on to the next before they themselves have. That’s why idiots are always so scared and aggressive. Because nothing scares idiots more than a smart girl.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“the best stories are never completely realistic and never entirely made-up.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“And Maud bakes cookies, because when the darkness is too heavy to bear and too many things have been broken in too many ways to ever be fixed again, Maud doesn't know what weapon to use if one can't use dreams.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“Because improbable tragedies create improbable superheroes.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“because the people who reach the end of their days must leave others who have to live out their days without them. It is very, very difficult to be the one who has to stay behind and live without them.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“All the best people are different -look at superheroes. After all, if superpowers were normal, everyone would have them.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“No,” she lies. Because she’s polite enough to know that if someone gives you a book, you owe that person the pretense that you haven’t read it.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry