Anxious People

by Fredrik Backman

“Do you know what the worst thing about being a parent is? That you’re always judged by your worst moments.

Parents are defined by their mistakes.”

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.

He sometimes thinks it’s impossible to know if children end up completely different despite the fact that they grew up together, or precisely because of that.

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

any parent: that you are loved in spite of everything that you are.

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.

The worst thing a divorce does to a person isn’t that it makes all the time you devoted to the relationship feel wasted, but that it steals all the plans you had for the future.

If you’re constantly presented with alternatives, you can never make up your mind,

transparent personality.

the people we argue with hardest of all are not the ones who are completely different from us, but the ones who are almost no different at all.