THE BEAUTY OF LANGUAGE

@beautyoflanguage

A literary collection of favorite moments and noteworthy lines.

148 posts

“Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.”

-Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

#things fall apart #chinua achebe

“But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and weakness. It was deeper and more intimate than the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw. Okonkwo’s fear was greater than these. It was not external but lay deep within himself. It was the fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father.

...

And so Okonkwo was ruled by one passion--to hate everything that his father Unoka had loved. One of those things was gentleness and another was idleness.”

-Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

#things fall apart #chinua achebe

“Death is a strange thing. People live their whole lives as if it does not exist, and yet it’s often one of the great motivations for living. Some of us, in time, become so conscious of it that we live harder, more obstinately, with more fury. Some need its constant presence to even be aware of its antithesis. Others become so preoccupied with it that they go into the waiting room long before it has announced its arrival. We fear it, yet most of us fear more than anything that it may take someone other than ourselves. For the greatest fear of death is always that it will pass us by. And leave us there alone.”

-A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

#life #death #ove #a man called ove #fredrik backman

“Maybe their sorrow over children that never came should have brought the two men closer. 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.”

-A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

#sorrow #rune #ove #a man called ove #fredrik backman

“And when one of her girlfriends asked why she loved him she answered that most men ran away from an inferno. But men like Ove ran into it.”

-A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

#ove #sonja #a man called ove #fredrik backman

“Maybe he didn’t write her poems or serenade her with songs or come home with expensive gifts. But no other boy had gone the wrong way on the train for hours every day just because he liked sitting next to her while she spoke.

And when she took hold of his lower arm, thick as her thigh, and tickled him until that sulky boy’s face opened up in a smile, it was like a plaster cast cracking around a piece of jewelry, and when this happened it was as if something started singing inside Sonja. And they belonged only to her, those moments.”

-A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

#ove #sonja #a man called ove #fredrik backman

“Before that day when the dour and slightly fumbling boy with the muscular body and the sad blue eyes sat down beside Sonja on the train, there were really only three things she loved unconditionally in life: books, her father, and cats.

She’d obviously had quite a lot of attention, it wasn’t that. The suitors had come in all shapes and sizes. Tall and dark or short and blond and fun-loving and dull and elegant and boastful and handsome and greedy...

But none of them had looked at her the way that boy looked at her when he sat down beside her on the train. As if she were the only girl in the world.”

-A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

#ove #sonja #a man called ove #fredrik backman

“Ove had never been asked how he lived before he met her. But if anyone had asked him, he would have answered that he didn’t.”

-A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

#ove #sonja #a man called ove #fredrik backman

“He had never heard anything quite as amazing as that voice. She talked as if she were continuously on the verge of breaking into giggles. And when she giggled she sounded the way Ove imagined champagne bubbles would have sounded if they were capable of laughter.”

-A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

#champagne #laughter #sonja #ove #a man called ove #fredrik backman

“His days passed like this, slow and methodical. And then one morning he saw her. She had brown hair and blue eyes and red shoes and a big yellow clasp in her hair.

And then there was no more peace and quiet for Ove.”

-A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

#ove #sonja #a man called ove #fredrik backman

“He never understood why she chose him. She loved only abstract things like music and books and strange words. Ove was a man entirely filled with tangible things. He liked screwdrivers and oil filters. He went through life with his hands firmly shoved into his pockets. She danced.”

-A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

#ove #sonja #a man called ove #fredrik backman

“Now everything had to be computerized, as if one couldn’t build a house until some consultant in a too-small shirt figured out how to open a laptop. As if that was how they built the Colosseum and the pyramids of Giza. Christ, they’d managed to build the Eiffel Tower in 1889, but nowadays one couldn’t come up with the bloody drawings for a one-story house without taking a break for someone to run off and recharge their cell phone.”

-A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

#digital age #a man called ove #fredrik backman

“Ove could not in all honesty remember how it all started. It wasn’t the sort of dispute where you did remember. It was more an argument where the little disagreements had ended up so entangled that every new word was treacherously booby-trapped, and in the end it wasn’t possible to open one’s mouth at all without setting off at least four unexploded mines from earlier conflicts. It was the sort of argument that had just run, and run, and run. Until one day it just ran out.”

-A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

#ove #rune #a man called ove #fredrik backman

“She often said that ‘all roads lead to something you were always predestined to do.’ And for her, perhaps, it was something.

But for Ove it was someone.”

-A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

#ove #sonja #a man called ove #fredrik backman

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

-Ove, A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

#ove #a man called ove #fredrik backman

“Of all the imaginable things he most misses about her, the thing he really wishes he could do again is hold her hand in his. She had a way of folding her index finger into his palm, hiding it inside. And he always felt that nothing in the world was impossible when she did that. Of all the things he could miss, that’s what he misses most.”

-A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

#a man called ove #sonja #fredrik backman

“Her laughter catches him off guard. As if it’s carbonated and someone has poured it too fast and it’s bubbling over in all directions. It doesn’t fit at all with the gray cement and right-angled garden paving stones. It’s an untidy, mischievous laugh that refuses to go along with rules and prescriptions.”

-A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

#laughter #a man called ove #fredrik backman

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