Britton > Britton's Quotes

“That's the power of literature, you know, it can act like little love letters between two people who can only explain their feelings by pointing at other people's.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“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. Work and pay bills, use dental floss and get to meetings on time, stand in line and fill out forms, come to grips with cables and put furniture together, change tires on the car and charge the phone and switch the coffee machine off and not forget to sign the kids up for swimming lessons. 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. We don't have time to think or breathe, we just wake up and start digging through the heap, because there will be another one dumped on us tomorrow. We look around occasionally, at our place of work or at parents' meetings or out in the street, and realize with horror that everyone else seems to know exactly what they're doing. We're the only ones who have to pretend. Everyone else can afford stuff and has a handle on other stuff and enough energy to deal with even more stuff. And everyone else's children can swim.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“Some people accept that they will never be free of their anxiety, they just learn to carry it. She tried to be one of them. She told herself that was why you should always be nice to other people, even idiots, because you never know how heavy their burden is.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“This story is about a lot of things, but mostly about idiots. So it needs saying from the outset that it’s always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“We don't have a plan, we just do our best to get through the day, because there'll be another one coming along tomorrow.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“Have you ever held a three-year-old by the hand on the way home from preschool?"

"No."

"You're never more important that you are then.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“But we weren't ready to become adults. Someone should have stopped us.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“Something my dad says...He says you end up marrying the one you don't understand. Then you spend the rest of your life trying.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“We give those we love nicknames, because love requires a word that belongs to us alone.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“Because perhaps it's true what they say, that up to a certain age a child loves you unconditionally and uncontrollably for one simple reason, you're theirs. Your parents and siblings can love you for the rest of your life, too, for precisely the same reason.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“We're just strangers passing each other, your anxieties briefly brushing against mine as the fibers of our coats touch momentarily on a crowded sidewalk somewhere. We never really know what to do to each other, with each other, for each other.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“Not knowing is a good place to start.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“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.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“People want to be good. Deep down. Kind. The problem of course is that it isn't always possible to be kind to idiots, because they're idiots.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“Because 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.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“It’s such an odd thing, the way you can know someone so perfectly through what they read.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“We're more than the sum total of our choices, that all the paths we might have taken factor somehow into the math of our identity.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“Imagine you’re a fish, swimming in a pond. You can move forward and back, side to side, but never up out of the water. If someone were standing beside the pond, watching you, you’d have no idea they were there. To you, that little pond is an entire universe. Now imagine that someone reaches down and lifts you out of the pond. You see that what you thought was the entire world is only a small pool. You see other ponds. Trees. The sky above. You realize you’re a part of a much larger and more mysterious reality than you had ever dreamed of.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“I've seen so many versions of you. With me. Without me. Artist. Teacher. Graphic designer. But it's all, in the end, just life. We see it macro, like one big story, but when you're in it, it's all just day-to-day, right? And isn't that what you have to make your peace with?”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“I love books, that’s all.” She could have added: I don’t always like people.”
― Christine Féret-Fleury, The Girl Who Reads on the Métro

“In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is to say his or her library has burned. When I first heard the phrase, I didn’t understand it, but over time I came to realize it was perfect. Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual’s consciousness is a collection of memories we’ve cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them. It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“All the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library’s simple unspoken promise: Here I am, please tell me your story; here is my story, please listen.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“It wasn't that time stopped in the library. It was as if it were captured, collected here, and in all libraries -- and not only my time, my life, but all human time as well. In the library, time is dammed up--not just stopped but saved.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“One room can contain an entire world.”
― Christine Féret-Fleury, The Girl Who Reads on the Métro

“You've stayed shut up inside with your books for too long. Like him. Books and people need to travel.”
― Christine Féret-Fleury, The Girl Who Reads on the Métro

“All the world's diseases—and all the remedies—were concealed between the covers of books. That in books you found betrayal, solitude, murder, madness, rage—everything that could grab you by the throat and ruin your life, not to mention others' lives, and that sometimes crying over printed pages could save a person's life.”
― Christine Féret-Fleury, The Girl Who Reads on the Métro

“The story of the world as she knew it was one big rumor that some people had taken the trouble to set down in writing, and which would continue to evolve, again and again, until the end.”
― Christine Féret-Fleury, The Girl Who Reads on the Métro