It's complicated."
"Yes, until someone explains it to you!

Everything is complicated if no one explains it to you.

Elsa thinks about how Granny used to say, 'You have standards and I have double standards, and so I win.

Everyone has a thousand wishes before a tragedy, but just one afterward.

Mum is a perfectionist and Dad is a pedant and that was partly why their marriage didn't work so well, Elsa figures. Because a perfectionist and a pedant are two very different things.

She found it easier to forgive than Ove did. Forgive God and the universe and everything. Ove got angry instead. Maybe because he felt someone had to be angry on her behalf, when everything that was evil seemed to assail the only person he'd ever met who didn't deserve it.