Gabrielle

“Her laughter catches him off guard. As if it’s carbonated and someone has poured it too fast and it’s bubbling over in all directions. It doesn’t fit at all with the gray cement and right-angled garden paving stones. It’s an untidy, mischievous laugh that refuses to go along with rules and prescriptions.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“Maybe he didn’t write her poems or serenade her with songs or come home with expensive gifts. But no other boy had gone the wrong way on the train for hours every day just because he liked sitting next to her while she spoke.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“Ove closes his eyes and thinks of Sonja. It's not that he's the sort of man who gives up and dies; he doesn't want her to think that. But it's actually wrong, all this. She married him. And now he doesn't quite know how to carry on without the tip of her nose in the pit between his throat and his shoulder. That's all.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove