Anxious People

by Fredrik Backman

Because there’s such an unbelievable amount that we’re all supposed to be able to cope with these days. You’re supposed to have a job, and somewhere to live, and a family, and you’re supposed to pay taxes and have clean underwear and remember the password to your damn Wi-Fi.

Our hearts are bars of soap that we keep losing hold of; the moment we relax, they drift off and fall in love and get broken, all in the wink of an eye.

In truth, we know as much about sex as we do about USB leads, and it always takes us four tries to get those little buggers in.

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

Because it’s possible to end your life by mistake, but you have to choose to jump. You have to climb on top of somewhere high and take a step forward.

You can do a million things right, but if you do one single thing wrong you’re forever that parent who was checking his phone in the park when your child was hit in the head by a swing.

No one goes to see a psychologist to talk about all the times they weren’t hit in the head by a swing as a child. Parents are defined by their mistakes.”

I’m one of those penguins that squats on top of a stone because I don’t want to accept that the egg has gone.

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.

in recent years society has turned into a place where nothing is named according to what it is anymore.

It’s hardly surprising that people get confused and society is going to the dogs when it’s full of caffeine-free coffee, gluten-free bread, alcohol-free beer.

if two famous actors were going to get divorced or not. She hoped they were, because sometimes it’s easier to live with your own anxieties if you know that no one else is happy, either.

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.

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.

“life can go all sorts of different ways, but it will probably go wrong.”

the bank robber swore never to become a parent, and, when the bank robber ended up becoming a parent anyway, swore never to become a chaotic parent. The sort who can’t cope with being an adult, the sort who can’t pay bills and has nowhere to live with their kids. And God laughed.

In the end we actually get so used to the feeling of failure that every time we don’t disappoint our children it leaves us feeling secretly shocked. It’s possible that some children realize this.

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.

“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?

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.

Listen, the problem with the middle class is that you think someone can be too rich to buy things. But that’s not true. You can only be too poor.

“Sometimes it’s hard to know who the biggest crooks are, people who rob banks, or the people who run the banks.”

“I didn’t say that money was happiness. I said happiness is like money. A made-up value that represents something we can’t weigh or measure.”

people suffering from depression to be afraid of feeling happy. Because even depression can be a sort of secure bubble, it can make you start to think,

practically everyone distinguishes between good and bad, so if we breach our own moral code, we have to come up with an excuse for ourselves. I think that’s known as neutralizing techniques in criminology. It could be religious or political conviction, or the belief that we had no choice, but we need something to justify our bad deeds.

You can get it into your head to do some unbelievably stupid things when you run out of tears, when you can’t silence the voices no one else can hear, when you’ve never been in a room where you felt normal.

nothing unites a group of strangers more effectively than the opportunity to come together and sigh at a hopeless case.

That’s the only thing someone who definitely wants to live and someone who definitely wants to die have in common: if you’re going to jump off something, you need to be pretty damn sure of the height.

When you’ve been together for a very long time, it’s the little things that matter. In a long marriage you don’t need words to have a row, but you don’t need words to say “I love you,” either.

First the heart stops, then it races. First comes the shock of not understanding what’s happening, then comes the shock of realizing precisely what’s happening. The survival instinct and fear of dying start to fight, making space for some surprisingly irrational thoughts in between.

Can you imagine what a bad parent you must have been for your children not to want to be parents?

‘emotionally challenged’?”

You’re like a self-help book, only in reverse.”

“Sensitive and principled,

“You love each other until you can’t live without each other. And even if you stop loving each other for a little while, you can’t… you can’t live without each other.”

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.

“Boats that stay in the harbor are safe, sweetheart, but that’s not what boats were built for.”

“Because I can see that you don’t want to let people get close to you. It makes you feel weak. But I don’t think you’re afraid of being hurt, I think you’re afraid of hurting other people. You’re a more empathetic and moral person than you like to admit.”

“It was just so incredibly unexpected. Why death metal?” “It’s so loud that it makes your head silent.”

He says you end up marrying the one you don’t understand. Then you spend the rest of your life trying.

“We probably make all the same mistakes that your generation did. Just different versions of them.”

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

children aren’t your children, they’re the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.

It’s such an odd thing, the way you can know someone so perfectly through what they read.

Sometimes two strangers only need one thing in common to find each other sympathetic.

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.