Anxious People

by Fredrik Backman

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.

Parents are defined by their mistakes.”

Because that was a parent’s job: to provide shoulders. Shoulders for your children to sit on when they’re little so they can see the world, then stand on when they get older so they can reach the clouds, and sometimes lean against whenever they stumble and feel unsure.

It’s hard to explain to a twelve-year-old that when you were little and I walked too fast, you would run to catch up with me and take hold of my hand, and that those were the best moments of my life.

dawn leaves behind it a fog as if someone has been setting fire to ghosts.

What an interesting description

the bank robber was thirty-nine, and had therefore reached an age where there’s suddenly very little difference between fourteen and twenty. That’s what makes a person feel old.

it’s easier to live with your own anxieties if you know that no one else is happy, either.

Not that this is in any way a defense of bank robbers, but they can have bad days at work, too. Hand on heart, which of us hasn’t wanted to pull a gun after talking to a twenty-year-old?

And you mustn’t tell lies. Unless… well, sometimes you have to, of course, like when your children ask: “Why does it smell like chocolate in here? ARE YOU EATING CHOCOLATE?”

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.

but keep the toy pistol,

Was the gun the robber used real?

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

“Because you use words like ‘stock market crash,’ but it’s never the stock market or the banks that crash. Only people do that.”

She was just one person out of several billion, and most people never become individuals to us. They’re just people. We’re just strangers passing each other, your anxieties briefly brushing against mine as the fibers of our coats touch momentarily on a crowded sidewalk somewhere.

“Have you ever held a three-year-old by the hand on the way home from preschool?” “No.” “You’re never more important than you are then.”

When you’re a child you long to be an adult and decide everything for yourself, but when you’re an adult you realize that’s the worst part of it.

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

“Are you going to raise it so that it doesn’t grow up to be one of those idiots who don’t take their backpack off when they’re on public transport?”

I hate that!