Ove Quotes

“Straight lines, even edges. People don’t shovel snow that way anymore. Nowadays they just clear a way, they use snow blowers and all sorts of things. Any old method will do, scattering snow all over the place. As if that were the only thing that mattered in life: pushing one’s way forward.”

“It is difficult to admit that one is wrong. Particularly when one has been wrong for a very long time.”

“But everywhere, sooner or later, he was stopped by men in white shirts with strict, smug expressions on their faces. And one couldn’t fight them. Not only did they have the state on their side, they were the state.”

“After the accident Ove bought a Saab 95 so he’d have space for Sonja’s wheelchair. That same year Rune bought a Volvo 245 to have space for a stroller. Three years later Sonja got a more modern wheelchair and Ove bought a hatchback, a Saab 900. Rune bought a Volvo 265 because Anita had started talking about having another child.”

“And if you could just go and buy everything, what was the value of it? What was the value of a man?”

“But sorrow is unreliable in that way. When people don’t share it there’s a good chance that it will drive them apart instead.”

“He was a man of black and white. And she was color. All the color he had.”

“He’d discovered that he liked houses. Maybe mostly because they were understandable... Houses were fair, they gave you what you deserved. Which, unfortunately, was more than one could say about people.”

“But Ove isn’t bloody arguing. He just thinks right is right. Is that such an unreasonable attitude to life?”

“But if anyone had asked, he would have told them that he never lived before he met her. And not after either.”

“Since his father’s death he had begun more and more to differentiate between people who did what they should, and those who didn’t. People who did and people who just talked. Ove talked less and less and did more and more.”

“Both men, once as close as men of that sort could be, stare at each other. One of them a man who refuses to forget the past, and one who can’t remember it at all.”

“It is difficult to admit that one is wrong. Particularly when one has been wrong for a very long time.”

“When he almost imperceptibly takes a half step backwards into the hall...he notices, from the corner of his eye, the photo of Sonja on the wall. The red dress. The bus trip to Spain when she was pregnant. He asked her so many times to take that bloody photo down, but she refused. She said it was ‘a memory worth as much as any other.‘”

“He went through life with his hands firmly shoved into his pockets. She danced.”

“Ove has probably known all along what he has to do, but all people at root are time optimists. We always think there’s enough time to do things with other people. Time to say things to them. And then something happens and then we stand there holding on to words like ‘if.‘”

“‘Men are what they are because of what they do. Not what they say.‘”

“It’s a strange thing, becoming an orphan at sixteen. To lose your family long before you’ve had time to create your own to replace it. It’s a very specific sort of loneliness.”