Anxious People

by Fredrik Backman

Deep down, in memories that we might prefer to suppress even from ourselves, a lot of us know that the difference between us and that man on the bridge is smaller than we might wish.

At the end of your career you’re trying to find a point to it all, and at the start of it you’re looking for a purpose.

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,’

(the psychologist hadn’t burdened herself with more than half a decade’s worth of student debt just to learn to say what she thought),

even depression can be a sort of secure bubble, it can make you start to think, If I’m not unhappy, if I’m not angry – who am I then?’

Zara was the first person who had ever suggested that the woman might be thinking of ending her life, no one else had looked at it like that.

The most expensive thing you can buy in the most densely populated places on the planet is distance.’

She was so used to saying what she knew other people wanted to hear, so they wouldn’t worry, that she did it

‘You love each other until you can’t live without each other. And even if you stop loving each other for a little while, you can’t … you can’t live without each other.’

‘You don’t fall in love with a gender, Anna-Lena. You fall in love with an idiot.’

‘Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.’

Addicts are addicted to their drugs, and their families are addicted to hope.

‘We can’t change the world, and a lot of the time we can’t even change people. No more than one bit at a time. So we do what we can to help whenever we get the chance, sweetheart. We save those we can. We do our best. Then we try to find a way to convince ourselves that that will just have to … be enough. So we can live with our failures without drowning.’

She wasn’t alone in the apartment, but no one in the world shared her prospects, and that’s the greatest loneliness in the world: when no one is walking beside you towards your destination.

you do it for long enough, it can become impossible to tell the difference between flying and falling.’

‘Boats that stay in the harbour are safe, sweetheart, but that’s not what boats were built for.’

happens, especially if you’re usually the one who sees through

have been married for ever. It’s like that when you get old. In the end there simply wasn’t ever a time before him.’

He says you end up marrying the one you don’t understand. Then you spend the rest of your life trying.

‘You don’t have to like all children. Just one. And children don’t need the world’s best parents, just their own parents.

humour is the soul’s last line of defence, and as long as we’re laughing we’re alive,

We plant an apple tree today, even if we know the world is going to be destroyed tomorrow.