A Man Called Ove Quotes
"He knew very well that you don’t lose much blood when you hang yourself, and it wasn’t because of worries about the dust or the drilling. Or the marks when he kicks away the stool."
"People said he was bitter. Maybe they were right. He’d never reflected much on it. People also called him antisocial. Ove assumed this meant he wasn’t overly keen on people. And in this instance he could totally agree with them."
"Every morning for the almost four decades they had lived in this house, Ove had put on the coffee percolator, using exactly the same amount of coffee as on any other morning, and then drank a cup with his wife."
"People said Ove saw the world in black and white. But she was color. All the color he had."
"He was a man of black and white. And she was color. All the color he had."
"The only thing he had ever loved until he saw her was numbers. He had no other particular memory of his youth."
"He was the sort of person who was just there. Nor did he remember so very much about his growing up; he had never been the sort of man who went around remembering things unless there was a need for it."
"Ove wasn’t one to engage in small talk. He had come to realize that, these days at least, this was a serious character flaw."
"He understood right angles and clear instruction manuals. Assembly models and drawings. Things one could draw on paper."
"You only need one ray of light to chase all the shadows away."
"Men are what they are because of what they do. Not what they say."
"You go to the hospital to die, Ove knows that."
"But he never disagreed with her. Maybe to her destiny was 'something'; that was none of his business. But to him, destiny was 'someone.'"
"A job well done is a reward in its own right."
"I'm not the sort that tells tales about what other people do."
"And if you don't know the story, you don't know the man."
"And then there was no more peace and quiet for Ove."
"It’s a strange thing, becoming an orphan at sixteen."
"You can’t trust bloody buses. The drivers are always drunks."
"And then he started walking. After forty-five minutes he asked his way to the only tailor in the area."
"Even men at train station ticket desks have been in love."
"I’ll be waiting here tomorrow evening at eight o’clock. I want you to be wearing a suit and I’d like you to invite me out for dinner."
"But if anyone had asked, he would have told them that he never lived before he met her. And not after either."
"If you can’t depend on someone being on time, you shouldn’t trust ’em with anything more important either."
"She told him with great animation about her studies, about books she’d read or films she’d seen."
"I just wanted to know what it felt like to be someone you look at."
"But why don’t you do it, then?" she demanded.
"He saved a man’s life; he’d fallen on the track!"
"Every man needs to know what he's fighting for."
"We can busy ourselves with living or with dying, Ove. We have to move on."
"Maybe he had started talking more inside his own head. Maybe he was going insane."
"But there was a time for everything, she also said."
"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."
"God took a child from me, darling Ove. But he gave me a thousand others."
"That God and the universe and all the other things would not be allowed to win. That the swine could go to hell."
"People live their whole lives as if [death] does not exist, and yet it’s often one of the great motivations for living."
"Sometimes it’s hard to explain why some men suddenly do the things they do."
"There is a sense of pride in having control. In being right."
"Death is a strange thing. People live their whole lives as if it does not exist."
"But you know how it is. People have no respect at all for personal boundaries anymore."
"Broadly speaking there are two kinds of people."
"It is difficult to admit that one is wrong. Particularly when one has been wrong for a very long time."