Quotes from My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry

I captured a ton of favorite quotes, many of them centered around the “different” theme… And yes, I wondered if Elsa was on the spectrum.

“Elsa is the sort of child who learned very early in life that it’s easier to make your way if you get to choose your own soundtrack.”

” ‘Only different people change the world,’ Granny used to say. ‘No one normal has ever changed a crapping thing.’ ”

“The best stories are never completely realistic and never entirely made up.”

“Because every fairy tale has a dragon.”

“It’s strange how close love and fear live to each other.”

“It’s a beautiful morning but a terrible day.”

“If you don’t like people, they can’t hurt you. Almost-eight-year-olds who are often described as ‘different’ learn that very quickly.”

“Because you hardly ever disappoint anybody if you just stay quiet. All almost-eight-year-olds know that.”

“Death’s greatest power is not that it can make people die, but that it can make people want to stop living.”

“You’d quickly run out of people if you had to disqualify all those who at some point have been shits. She thinks that this will have to be the moral of this story.”

“‘We want to be loved,'” quotes Britt-Marie. “‘Failing that, admired; failing that, feared; failing that, hated and despised. At all costs we want to stir up some sort of feeling in others. The soul abhors a vacuum. At all costs it longs for contact.'”

“And Maud bakes cookies, because when the darkness is too heavy to bear and too many things have been broken in too many ways to ever be fixed again, Maud doesn’t know what weapon to use if one can’t use dreams.”

“Because if a sufficient number of people are different, no one has to be normal.”

I read this several years ago, but I wrote down the quote “only different people change the world.” Such wise words.