Anxious People

by Fredrik Backman

“Sensitive and principled, you hear that a lot,” Julia nodded, thinking that it was a good description of all the old men who’ve started wars throughout human history.

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

“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.”

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.”

‘You can’t live long with the ones who are only beautiful, Jules. But the funny ones, oh, they last a lifetime!’ ”

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

humor is the soul’s last line of defense, and as long as we’re laughing we’re alive, so bad puns and fart jokes were their way of expressing their defiance against despair.

He’s always felt that the hardest thing about death is the grammar.

The hardest thing about death is the grammar, the tense, the fact that she won’t be angry when she sees that he’s bought a new sofa without consulting her first. She won’t be anything. She isn’t on her way home. She was. And she really did get angry that time Jim bought a new sofa without consulting her first, goodness, how angry she was. She could travel halfway around the world to the worst chaos on the planet, but when she came home everything had to be exactly the way it always was or she got upset. Of course that was just one of her many strange little habits and quirks: she put onion flakes on breakfast cereal and poured béarnaise sauce on popcorn, and if you yawned when she was next to you, she would lean forward and stick a finger in your mouth, just to see if she could pull it out again before you closed your mouth. Sometimes she put cornflakes in Jim’s shoes, sometimes little bits of boiled egg and anchovies in Jack’s pockets, and the looks on their faces when they realized seemed to amuse her more and more each time she did it. That’s the kind of thing you miss. That she used to do this, that she used to do that. She was, she is. She was Jim’s wife. Jack’s mom is dead.

Jim held on to the handrail to stop himself collapsing as his heart broke. Empathy is like vertigo.

She looks up at the sky, dark now, December is merciless. But she knows that IKEA is still open. A light out there, somewhere.