Hello and Welcome. This page is a collection of 45 quotes that I liked and saved while reading Beartown book by Fredrik Backman. I hope you will like them too.
By the way, I am Deepak Kundu, an avid book reader, quotes collector and blogger.
Beartown Quotes
- Never trust people who don’t have something in their lives that they love beyond all reason.
- Work hard, take the knocks, don’t complain, keep your mouth shut, and show the bastards in the big cities where we’re from.
- This town needs to win at something. We need to feel, just once, that we’re best. I know it’s a game. But that’s not all it is. Not always.
- You never have the sort of friends you have when you’re fifteen ever again. Even if you keep them for the rest of your life, it’s never the same as it was then.
- You have to be thick-skinned in Beartown. That helps you deal with both the cold and the insults.
- There’s one thing you need to know: desire always beats luck.
- There are two things that are particularly good at reminding us how old we are: children and sports.
- We love winners, even though they’re very rarely particularly likeable people. They’re almost always obsessive and selfish and inconsiderate. That doesn’t matter. We forgive them. We like them while they’re winning.
- One of the hardest things about getting old is admitting mistakes that it’s too late to put right.
- The worst thing about having power over other people’s lives is that you sometimes get things wrong.
- Talent is like letting two balloons up into the air: the most interesting thing isn’t watching which one climbs fastest, but which one has the longest string.
- Sports creates complicated men, proud enough to refuse to admit their mistakes, but humble enough always to put their team first.
- Say what you like about Beartown, it can take your breath away. When the sun rises above the lake, when the mornings are so cold that the oxygen itself is crisp, when the trees seem to bow respectfully over the ice in order to let as much light as possible reach the children playing on it, then you can’t help wondering how anyone could choose to live in places where all you can see are concrete and buildings.
- One of the plainest truths about both towns and individuals is that they usually don’t turn into what we tell them to be, but what they are told they are.
- A simple truth, repeated as often as it is ignored, is that if you tell a child it can do absolutely anything, or that it can’t do anything at all, you will in all likelihood be proven right.
- A long marriage is complicated. So complicated, in fact, that most people in one sometimes ask themselves: “Am I still married because I’m in love, or just because I can’t be bothered to let anyone else get to know me this well again?”.
- At a certain point in a person’s life you either sink or swim, and nothing really matters anymore.
- That’s always the way with sons of fathers who liked whisky a little too much: you either drink it all the time or not at all. There’s no in-between in some families.
- Being a parent makes you feel like a blanket that’s always too small. No matter how hard you try to cover everyone, there’s always someone who’s freezing.
- Success is never a coincidence. Luck can give you money, but never success.
- 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.
- 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. But what the hell else is life made of?
- 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 its causes.
- For the perpetrator, rape lasts just a matter of minutes. For the victim, it never stops.
- Even in a town that’s covered with snow three-quarters of the year, it’s unbearably cold standing in the shade of someone who’s a bit more popular than you are.
- Humanity has many shortcomings, but none is stronger than pride.
- A great deal is expected of anyone who’s been given a lot.
- You want to be a hockey coach? Get used to not having the things other people have. Free time, a family life, decent coffee. Only the toughest of men can handle this sport. Men who can drink terrible coffee cold, if need be.
- The best hockey players are like the best hunting dogs. They’re born egotists; they always hunt for their own sake. So you need to nurture them and train them and love them until they start hunting for your sake too. For their teammates’ sake. Only then can they become really good. Truly great.
- Most people don’t do what we tell them to. They do what we let them get away with.
- If there’s one thing teenagers know the price of, it’s all the things they can’t afford.
- Violence is like whisky: children in homes that have too much of it grow up either full of it, or entirely without it.
- One of the first things you learn as a leader, whether you choose the position or have it forced upon you, is that leadership is as much about what you don’t say as what you do say.
- Ignore everything else, just concentrate on the things you can change.
- We’re bad losers, because a good loser is someone who loses a lot.
- Hate can be a deeply stimulating emotion. The world becomes much 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.
- There are damn few things in life that are harder than admitting to yourself that you’re a hypocrite.
- An entrepreneur who isn’t moving isn’t actually standing still, he’s going backward.
- You have to switch off your brain in order to play it. Music is like taking a break from yourself.
- The only way to stop being afraid of the darkness out there is to find a darkness inside yourself that’s bigger.
- The only thing that might be worse than being accused of rape is being raped.
- Fighting isn’t hard. it’s the starting and stopping that are hard. once you’re actually fighting, it happens more or less instinctively. the complicated thing about fighting is daring to throw the first punch, and then, once you’ve won, refraining from throwing that very last one.
- 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.
- Time always moves at the same rate, only feelings have different speeds. Every day can mark a whole lifetime or a single heartbeat, depending on who you spend it with.
- Homosexuality is a weapon of mass destruction, remember that. it’s not natural. if everyone turns gay, mankind will be wiped out in a generation.