Piper Caryl

“But here: I just want you to know that I'm not going to try to trick you into thinking there's no evil in the world. Because there is. This world sometimes seems like it's full of incomprehensible, unintelligible, unembraceable, inexorable evil. Violence and injustice and greed and blind rage.

But it's also full of all that other stuff. The small things. Kindness between strangers. Love at first sight. Loyalty and friendship. Someone's hand in yours on a Sunday afternoon. Two brothers reconciled. Heroes who stand up when no one else dares. A fiftysomething man in a Saab who slows down when he sees your turn signal and lets you into his lane during rush hour. Summer nights. Children's laughter. Cheesecake.

And all you can do is decide which side you want to be on. Which pile you want to contribute to.”
― Fredrik Backman, Things My Son Needs to Know About the World

“Louisa is a teenager, the best kind of human. The evidence for this is very simple: little children think teenagers are the best humans, and teenagers think teenagers are the best humans, the only people who don't think teenagers are the best humans are adults. Which is obviously because adults are the worst kind of humans.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“But my generation knows, OKAY? We know EVERYTHING! So if anything goes sideways with your childhood, I’ll be held responsible. It will never be legally sustainable that I acted “in good faith.” I could have googled it. I should have googled it. My God, why didn’t I google it? Damn it.”
― Fredrik Backman, Things My Son Needs to Know about the World