Hello and Welcome. This page is a collection of 42 quotes from Beartown book by Fredrik Backman that I liked and saved while reading this book. I hope you will like these quotes too.
By the way, I am Deepak Kundu, an avid book reader, quotes collector and blogger.
Quotes on Being a Parent
- 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.
- 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.
Quotes for Daily Inspiration
- There’s one thing you need to know: desire always beats luck.
- Success is never a coincidence. Luck can give you money, but never success.
Quotes on Growing Old
- There are two things that are particularly good at reminding us how old we are: children and sports.
- One of the hardest things about getting old is admitting mistakes that it’s too late to put right.
Other 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.
- You can’t live in this town, you can only survive it.
- 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.
- 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.
- The worst thing about having power over other people’s lives is that you sometimes get things wrong.
- Sports creates complicated men, proud enough to refuse to admit their mistakes, but humble enough always to put their team first.
- 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.
- One of the funny things about fighting for success is that you never really stop fighting. You never stop being scared of falling from the top, because when you close your eyes you can still feel the pain from each and every step of the way up.
- 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.
- Good workers aren’t enough on their own, someone needs to have big ideas as well. Collectives only work if they’re built around stars.
- 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?”.
- 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.
- All adults occasionally wonder about another life, one they could be living instead of the one they’ve got. How often they do so probably depends on how happy they are.
- 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.
- 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.
- Big secrets turn us into small men.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.