Anxious People

by Fredrik Backman

it’s always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is.

But we weren’t ready to become adults. Someone should have stopped us.

Not that this is in any way a defense of bank robbers, but they can have bad days at work, too. Hand on heart, which of us hasn’t wanted to pull a gun after talking to a twenty-year-old?

Even astonishingly late in life, people seem incapable of considering that their parents might not be super-smart and really funny and immortal.

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. Not that that really makes much

When he left her she wept so hard that she couldn’t breathe. Her body was never really the same after that, she curled up and never quite unfurled again. “He was my echo. Everything I do is quieter now,”