She just smiled, said that she loved books more than anything, and started telling him excitedly what each of the ones in her lap was about. And Ove realised that he wanted to hear her talking about the things she loved for the rest of his life.

That's the only thing someone who definitely wants to live and someone who definitely wants to die have in common: if you're going to jump off something, you need to be pretty damn sure of the height.

We've created lives where we can watch other people crash into the wall but still hope that somehow we're going to pass straight through it. The closer we get, more confidently we believe that some unlikely solution is miraculously going to save us, while everyone watching us is just waiting for the crash.

Something inside a man goes to pieces when he has to bury the only person who ever understood him. There is no time to heal that sort of wound.

Just because you don’t like peanut butter doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t like . . . peanuts.

If you’re constantly presented with alternatives, you can never make up your mind.

Children need the lie to be brave enough to sleep in their beds; parents need it to be able to get up the next morning.

Loving someone is like moving into a house. At first you fall in love with all the new things, then over the years the walls become weathered, the wood splinters here and there, and you start to love that house not so much because of all its perfection, but rather its imperfections.

Life is so damn, damn, damn tough sometimes that it's almost unbearable. Even if that's the way it's supposed to be.