Anxious People

by Fredrik Backman

Our hearts are bars of soap that we keep losing hold of; the moment we relax, they drift off and fall in love and get broken, all in the wink of an eye.

That’s an impossible thing for sons to grasp, and a source of shame for fathers to have to admit: that we don’t want our children to pursue their own dreams or walk in our footsteps. We want to walk in their footsteps while they pursue our dreams.

‘if you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans,’

We give those we love nicknames, because love requires a word that belongs to us alone.

The truth, of course, is that if people really were as happy as they look on the Internet, they wouldn’t spend so much damn time on the Internet, because no one who’s having a really good day spends half of it taking pictures of themselves. Anyone can nurture a myth about their life if they have enough manure, so if the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, that’s probably because it’s full of shit.

If anyone asked her to sum up her view of the world, she always quoted Martin Luther: ‘Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.’

If you can do something for someone in such a way that they think they managed it all on their own, then you’ve done a good job.’

loneliness is like starvation, you don’t realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.

Hurt by this, Jim’s shoulders slump as he finds himself declared an idiot.

Nothing must happen to you No, what am I saying Everything must happen to you And it must be wonderful

They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.