Swedish writer Fredrik Backman has certainly become the darling of the literary world in the past decade. Ever since making his literary debut with A Man Called Ove, he has been churning out one compelling story after another. Recently, the translation of his latest novel, My Friends, has been released. It is a book that I am looking forward to. It just might become part of my ongoing foray into the works of European writers. For now, I am featuring quotable lines from his novel Beartown, the first book in his trilogy of the same name. It is a vivid portrait of a community on the brink of social and economic decline. A controversy unraveled it just when it was about to rise to national acclaim. I know, it has been over a year since I read the book, but I can’t keep my mind from the lines that made an impression on me. It did take some time, but here are some of the memorable lines from the book that have left an impression on me.

Do check out my complete review of Fredrik Backman’s novel by clicking here.

“While he was growing up everyone kept telling him he was going to turn professional, and he believed them so intensely that when he didn’t make it, he took it to mean that everyone else had let him down, as if somehow it wasn’t his own fault. he wakes up in the mornings with the feeling that someone has stolen a better life from him, an unbearable phantom pain between what he should have been and what he actually became. Bitterness can be corrosive: it can rewrite your memories as if it were scrubbing a crime scene clean, until in the end you only remember what suits you of it’s causes.”

~ Fredrik Backman, Beartown 

“He once heard that the best way to prepare mentally for becoming a parent is to stay in a tent at a weeklong rock festival with a load of fat friends who are smoking hash. You blunder about in a permanent state of acute sleep deprivation wearing clothes covered with stains from food that is only very rarely your own, you suffer from tinnitus, you can’t go near a puddle without some giggling fool jumping in it, you can’t go to the bathroom without someone standing outside banging on the door, you get woken up in the middle of the night because someone was “just thinking about something,” and you get woken up the next morning to find someone pissing on you.”

~ Fredrik Backman, Beartown 

“All adults have days when we feel completely drained. When we no longer know quite what we spend so much time fighting for, when reality and everyday worries overwhelm us and we wonder how much longer we’re going to be able to carry on. The wonderful thing is that we can all live through far more days like that without breaking than we think. The terrible thing is that we never know exactly how many.”

~ Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“Hate can be a deeply stimulating emotion. The world becomes easier to understand and much less terrifying if you divide everything and everyone into friends and enemies, we and they, good and evil. The easiest way to unite a group isn’t through love, because love is hard, It makes demands. Hate is simple. So the first thing that happens in a conflict is that we choose a side, because that’s easier than trying to hold two thoughts in our heads at the same time. The second thing that happens is that we seek out facts that confirm what we want to believe – comforting facts, ones that permit life to go on as normal. The third is that we dehumanize our enemy.”

~ Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“If you are honest, people may deceive you. Be honest anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfishness. Be kind anyway. All the good you do today will be forgotten by others tomorrow. Do good anyway. What you create, others can destroy. Create anyway. Because in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and anyone else anyway.”

~ Fredrik Backman, Beartow

“One of all the terrible effects of grief is that we interpret its absence as egotism. It’s impossible to explain what you have to do in order to carry on after a funeral, how to put the pieces of a family back together again, how to live with the jagged edges. So what do you end up asking for? Yo ask for a good day. One single good day. A few hours of amnesia.”

~ Fredrik Backman, Beartown 

“All their lives, girls are told that the only thing they need to do is their best. That that will be enough, as long as they give everything they’ve got. When they themselves become mothers, they promise their daughters that it’s true, that if we just do as well as we can, if we’re honest and work hard, look after our family and love each other, then eerything will be all right. Everything will be fine, there’s nothing to be frightened of. Children need the lie to be brave enought to sleep in their beds; parents need to be able to get up the next morning.”

~ Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“On the one hand, our entire species survived because we stuck together and cooperated, but on the other hand we developed because the strongest individuals always thrived at the expense of the weak. So we always end up arguing about where the boundaries should be drawn. How selfish are we allowed to be? How much are we obliged to care about each other?”

~ Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“Some people say hockey is like religion. But that’s wrong. Hockey is like faith. Religion is something between you and other people; it’s full of interpretations and theories and opinions. But faith… that’s just between you and God. It’s what you feel in your chest when the referee glides out to the center circle between two players, when you hear the sticks strike each other and see the black disk fall between them. Then it’s just between you and hockey. Because cherry trees always smell of cherry trees. Whereas money smells of nothing.”

~ Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“The love a parent feels for a child is strange. There is a starting point to our love for everyone else, but not this person. This one we have always loved, we loved them before they even existed. No matter how well-prepared they are, all moms and dads experience a moment of total shock, when the tidal wave of feelings first washed through them, knocking them off their feet. It’s incomprehensible because there’s nothing to compare it to. It’s like trying to describe sand between your toes or snowflakes on your tongue to someone who lived their whole life in a dark room. It sends the soul flying.”

~ Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“He’s never cut his own skin, but he understands those who do. Sometimes he has longed so much for a pain he can see and focus on that he’s taken the train to a town several hours away, waited until dark, and then sought out the biggest bastards he could find to start a fight with, and then fought until they had no choice but to give him a serious beating. Because sometimes, when it seriously hurt on the outside, it hurt a little bit less in other places.”

~ Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“Hockey is just a silly little game. We devote year after year after year to it without ever really hoping to get anything in return. We burn and bleed and cry, fully aware that the most the sport can give us, in the very best scenario, is incomprehensibly meager and worthless: just a few isolated moments of transcendence. That’s all.”

~ Fredrik Backman, Beartown