A Man Called Ove

by

Fredrik Backman

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Chapter 2 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Ove, Sonja
Related Symbols: Houses
Page Number: 5
Explanation and Analysis:

Ove didn't really care who was parked in the guest parking area, of course. But it was a question of principle. If it said twenty-four hours on the sign, that's how long you were allowed to stay.

Related Characters: Ove
Page Number: 7
Explanation and Analysis:

Because nowadays people are all thirty-one and wear too-tight trousers and no longer drink normal coffee. And don't want to take responsibility. A shed-load of men with elaborate beards, changing jobs and changing wives and changing their car makes. Just like that. Whenever they feel like it.

Related Characters: Ove, Anders
Page Number: 11
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

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

Related Characters: Ove, Sonja
Related Symbols: Color (Pink)
Page Number: 33
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

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

Related Characters: Ove
Related Symbols: Houses
Page Number: 37
Explanation and Analysis:

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

Related Characters: Ove
Related Symbols: Color (Pink)
Page Number: 37
Explanation and Analysis:

"Engines give you what you deserve," he used to explain. "If you treat them with respect they'll give you freedom; if you behave like an ass they'll take it from you."

Related Characters: Ove's Father (speaker), Ove
Page Number: 37
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Ove, Ove's Father
Page Number: 73
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Ove
Related Symbols: Houses
Page Number: 90
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 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.

Related Characters: Ove
Page Number: 98
Explanation and Analysis:

It wasn't supposed to be like this. You work and pay off the mortgage and pay taxes and do what you should. You marry. For better or for worse until death do us part, wasn't that what they agreed? Ove remembers quite clearly that it was. And she wasn't supposed to be the first to die. Wasn't it bloody well understood that it was his death they were talking about? Well, wasn't it?

Related Characters: Ove, Sonja
Page Number: 103
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 13 Quotes

"And you can't let the girls freeze to death tonight, Ove, right? It's quite enough that they had to watch you assault a clown, no?"

Related Characters: Parvaneh / “The Foreign Pregnant Woman” (speaker), Ove, Patrick / “The Lanky One”, Nasanin, The Seven-year-old
Page Number: 127
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

And now she stood outside the station with his flowers pressed happily to her breast, in that red cardigan of hers, making the rest of the world look as if it were made in grayscale.

Related Characters: Ove, Sonja
Related Symbols: Color (Pink)
Page Number: 133
Explanation and Analysis:

She wanted to get married, so Ove proposed. She wanted children, which was fine with him, said Ove. And their understanding was that children should live in row housing developments among other children.

Related Characters: Ove, Sonja
Related Symbols: Houses
Page Number: 136
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 17 Quotes

As if the kitchen had been built for a child. Parvaneh stares at them the way people always do when they see it for the first time. Ove has got used to it. He rebuilt the kitchen himself after the accident. The council refused to help, of course.

Related Characters: Ove, Sonja, Parvaneh / “The Foreign Pregnant Woman”
Related Symbols: Houses
Page Number: 163
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 23 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Ove, Sonja
Related Symbols: White Shirts
Page Number: 204
Explanation and Analysis:

Every human being needs to know what she's fighting for. That was what they said. And she fought for what was good. For the children she never had. And Ove fought for her.

Related Characters: Ove, Sonja
Page Number: 205
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 24 Quotes

When she says that last bit she points at a figure in the middle of the drawing. Everything else on the paper is drawn in black, but the figure in the middle is a veritable explosion of color. A riot of yellow and red and blue and green and orange and purple.
"You're the funniest thing she knows. That's why she always draws you in color," says Parvaneh.

Related Characters: Parvaneh / “The Foreign Pregnant Woman” (speaker), Ove, Nasanin
Related Symbols: Color (Pink)
Page Number: 212
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 25 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Ove, Rune
Page Number: 218
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 28 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Ove, Sonja, Rune, Anita
Related Symbols: Cars
Page Number: 245
Explanation and Analysis:

Rune and Anita's lad grew up and cleared out of home as soon as he got the chance. And Rune went and bought a sporty BMW, one of those cars that only has space for two people and a handbag. Because now it was only him and Anita, as he told Sonja when they met in the parking area. "And one can't drive a Volvo all of one's life," he said with an attempt at a halfhearted smile. She could hear that he was trying to swallow his tears. And that was the moment when Ove realized that a part of Rune had given up forever.

Related Characters: Rune (speaker), Ove, Sonja
Related Symbols: Cars
Page Number: 246
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 32 Quotes

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."

Related Characters: Sonja (speaker), Ove, Mirsad / “The Young Man”, Adrian / “The Youth”
Page Number: 280
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 33 Quotes

He thinks about how Sonja would have taken it if she'd found out. If she'd known that her best friend had not asked for her help because Sonja had "enough problems." She would have been heartbroken.

Related Characters: Ove, Sonja, Jimmy, Rune, Anita
Page Number: 287
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 39 Quotes

"They can call me whatever they like. No need for you to stick your bloody nose in."
And then he puts up the drawings one by one on the fridge. The one that says "To Granddad" gets the top spot.

Related Characters: Ove (speaker), Parvaneh / “The Foreign Pregnant Woman”, Nasanin, The Seven-year-old
Page Number: 330
Explanation and Analysis:
Epilogue Quotes

The woman is pregnant. Her eyes glitter as she walks through the rooms, the way eyes glitter when a person imagines her child's future memories unfolding there on the floor.

Related Characters: Parvaneh / “The Foreign Pregnant Woman”
Related Symbols: Houses
Page Number: 337
Explanation and Analysis:
No matches.