Anxious People

by Fredrik Backman

A bank robbery. A hostage drama. A stairwell full of police officers on their way to storm an apartment.

One thing is clear about a Backman book, he is going to start it by telling you what will happen. Then somehow you're still surprised when it does!

One single really bad idea. That’s all it takes.

Ain't that the truth!

This was precisely why he didn’t want his son to become a policeman.

If your mom was a priest and your dad a policeman, if you’d grown up taking it for granted that you have to help people if you can,

So the teenage boy ran out onto the bridge and shouted to the man, and the man stopped.

Parents are defined by their mistakes.”

There was a financial crisis somewhere in the world and a bank in New York went bankrupt, and far away in a small town in a completely different country lived a man who lost everything.

if a man standing on a railing takes the time to tell a stranger how much he loves his children, you

know he doesn’t really want to jump. And then he jumped.

Oh I didn't expect that.

“There are days when I can’t help thinking you never really came back from that bridge, love. That you’re still trying to save that man on the railing, even though it’s as impossible now as it was back then.”

How traumatic

He did all he could, all he could! But the man jumped anyway. Can you imagine what that does to a person? My son… he always wants to rescue everyone.

It was the teenage girl who was standing on the same railing a week later that made him want it. The one who didn’t jump.

Jim was born in a generation that regarded computers as magic, Jack in one that has always taken them for granted.

children used to

be punished by being sent to their rooms, but these days you have to force child...

got told off for not being able to sit still, the next gets told ...

We want to walk in their footsteps while they pursue our dreams.

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.

We open our eyes in the morning and life is just waiting to tip a fresh avalanche of “Don’t Forget!”s and “Remember!”s over us.

So true

“when one party in an agreement is protected against the negative consequences of its own actions.”

“It’s when two idiots are sitting on a creaking tree branch, and the one closest to the trunk is holding the saw.”

Funny

“But it isn’t my fault that they lost all my money!” the man exclaimed. The woman looked at him coolly and declared: “Yes it is. Because you shouldn’t have given them your money.”

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

Especially if it wasn’t just a fling, but an affair that had been going on for a long time. You haven’t only been cheated on, you’ve also been deceived.

Suddenly you find yourselves living alongside each other, not with each other.

This happens to too many married couples. You can't become rommmates.

“I’ve got cancer.”

“I haven’t got cancer. I was lying. But that’s what I was saying: democracy doesn’t work!”

“I’m thinking that if I had to choose just one picture to have on a wall, it wouldn’t be that one.”

Are we supposed to like Zara? She is very obnoxious and rude.

That was why she had painted the picture, as a reminder to herself.

you can look at it for ages without noticing the most obvious thing. The fact that the woman is standing on a bridge.

But the teenage girl on the bridge was called Nadia. It was the week after the man had jumped to his death from the railing where she was standing.

If Roger was here he’d have told you that you’re all idiots, the whole lot of you, for managing to lose a bank robber who was trapped inside an apartment!

Is everyone that rude to police in this country????

and Peter Pan declaring: “To die will be an awfully big adventure.” Maybe for the person doing it, Estelle thought, but not for the one who was left behind.

My biggest fear I'd becoming a widow.

the ones who make you laugh last a lifetime,”

Truth!