Anxious People

by Fredrik Backman

Because the terrible thing about becoming an adult is being forced to realize that absolutely nobody cares about us, we have to deal with everything ourselves now, find out how the whole world works.

“Love one another until death do us part,” isn’t that what we said? Isn’t that what we promised each other? Or am I remembering wrong? “Or at least until one of us gets bored.” Maybe that was it?

I love how it describes the sensitive things like marriage, infidelit, cheat, and divorce like telling story about princess diaries.

You try to explain that if you had money, you wouldn’t need a loan, but the bank can’t see the logic in that.

Why is it that people like you always think successful people should be punished for their success?

happiness is like money. A made-up value that represents something we can’t weigh or measure.”

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

just because you don’t much like life doesn’t necessarily mean you want the alternative.

One of the most human things about anxiety is that we try to cure chaos with chaos. Someone who has got themselves into a catastrophic situation rarely retreats from it, we’re far more inclined to carry on even faster. We’ve created lives where we can watch other people crash into the wall but still hope that somehow we’re going to pass straight through it. The closer we get, the more confidently we believe that some unlikely solution is miraculously going to save us, while everyone watching us is just waiting for the crash.”

He never remembers the end of films, so he can watch them any number of times and still be surprised when he finds out who the murderer is.

Sometimes we don’t need distance, just barriers.

All because it’s so damn difficult to admit that something else is… broken. That it’s an ache in our soul, invisible lead weights in our blood, an indescribable pressure in our chest. Our brains are lying to us, telling us we’re going to die. But there’s nothing wrong with our lungs, Zara. We’re not going to die, you and I.”

Only four words in length, no more than that. The four biggest little words one person, anyone at all, can say to another: It wasn’t your fault.

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.