Bianca > Bianca's Quotes

“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

“I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.”
― Bill Bryson, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

“Never mess with someone who has more spare time than you do[.]”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“Elsa decides that even if people she likes have been shits on earlier occasions, she has to learn to carry on liking them. You’d quickly run out of people if you had to disqualify all those who at some point have been shits.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“Every seven-year-old deserves a superhero. That's just how it is.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“So many hearts broke the day Elsa was born. Shattered with such force by the wave that the shards of the glass were dispersed all around the world. Improbable catastrophes produce improbable things in people, improbable sorrow and improbable heroism.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“I stifle the urge to go back to the window and assess my competition. But it's not a competition if one person can't even show up for the event.”
― Nicola Yoon, Everything, Everything

“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

“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

“It’s hard to help those who don’t want to help themselves.”

“Someone who wants to help himself is possibly not the one who most needs help from others,” Elsa objects.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“The currency there is imagination; instead of buying something with coins, you buy it with a good story. Libraries aren’t known as libraries but as “banks,” and every fairy tale is worth a fortune.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“Because if a sufficient number of people are different, no one has to be normal.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“And then it goes as with all anger attacks. They don’t just consist of one anger, but of many. A long series of angers, flung into a volcano in one’s breast until it erupts.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“He is wearing a rugby shirt with numbers and a little man on a horse on his chest. Kent has told Elsa that this sort of shirt costs more than a thousand kronor, and Granny always used to say that those sorts of shirts were a good thing, because the horse functioned as a sort of manufacturer’s warning that the shirt was highly likely to be transporting a muppet.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“So when a fat lady who looks like she’s combed her hair with a toaster starts reading poems, Elsa thinks it’s just about enough and she pushes her way out between the pews.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“It's much more difficult to have conflict when there are cookies around.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“Some seek the light and hold the light in place. Erik Fiskare didn't like being the center of attention, but he liked situations where he had to keep the attention centered.”
― Suanne Laqueur, The Man I Love

“Childhood is supposed to be a radiant springtime but mine seems to have been always autumn, the gales seething in the big beeches behind this old gate-lodge, as they’re doing right now, and the rooks above them wheeling haphazard, like scraps of char from a bonfire, and a custard-coloured gleam having its last go low down in the western sky.”
― John Banville

“Some seek the limelight and some hold the light in place”
― Suanne Laqueur, The Man I Love

“Call me Autolycus. Well, no, don’t. Although I am, like that unfunny clown, a picker-up of unconsidered trifles. Which is a fancy way of saying I steal things”
― John Banville

“The fact is, whenever I made an overture to a woman, which I seldom did, even in my young days, I never really expected it to be entertained, or even noticed, despite certain instances of success, which I tended to regards as flukes, the result of misunderstanding, or dimness on the part of the woman and simple good fortune on mine. I’m not an immediately alluring specimen, having been, for a start, the runt of the litter. I’m short and stout, or better go the whole hog and say fat, with a big head and tiny feet. My hair is of a shade somewhere between wet rust and badly tarnished brass, and in damp weather, or when I’m by the seaside, clenches itself into curls that are as tight and dense as cauliflower florets and stubbornly resistant to fiercest combings. My skin – oh, my skin! – is a flaccid, moist, off-white integument, so that I look as if I had been blanched in the dark for a long time. Of my freckles I shall not speak”
― John Banville, The Blue Guitar

“And anyway, who’s to say that what we see when we’re drunk is not reality, and the sober world a bleared phantasmagoria”
― John Banville, The Blue Guitar

“… a thief’s heart is an impetuous organ, and while inwardly he throbs for absolution, at the same time he can’t keep from bragging.”
― John Banville, The Blue Guitar

“Happy sadness, sad happiness, the story of my life and loves”
― John Banville, The Blue Guitar

“Lots of water under that bridge, let’s not drown ourselves in it.”
― John Banville, The Blue Guitar

“A married couple never seem so married as when viewed from the back seat of a motor car, talking quietly together in the front. Polly and Marcus might have been in their bedroom already, so soft and intimate their converse sounded to me, as I sat there alertly mute behind the backs of their heads”
― John Banville, The Blue Guitar

“Perhaps it was the flabby stink of seared flesh that was making me feel peculiar; that, and the smoke from the candles on the tables and the borborygmic blarings of the three-piece band.”
― John Banville

“Thank you for giving me your arm and those four hours that I now understand you did not have an endless supply of. It was short but I loved our little trip. We fell in love, but the way you love a view that comes along once or twice in life.”
― Mary-Louise Parker, Dear Mr. You

“If you’re willing to accept what you can’t change, we have many positive suggestions for improving the way you manage the shit on your plate—beginning with not wasting time repeating what hasn’t been working.”
― Michael Bennett, F*ck Feelings: One Shrink's Practical Advice for Managing All Life's Impossible Problems

“That’s why your primary goal is not to get rid of negative feelings and feel better, but to block them from controlling your behavior while you continue to act like a decent person.”
― Michael Bennett, F*ck Feelings: One Shrink's Practical Advice for Managing All Life's Impossible Problems