Anxious People Fredrik Backman 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.

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. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.

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.

We give those we love nicknames, because love requires a word that belongs to us alone.

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

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.

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.

Nothing is easier for people who never do anything themselves than to criticize someone who actually makes an effort.

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.

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.

God doesn't protect people from knives, sweetheart. That's why God gave us other people, so we can protect each other.

We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we're more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.

He was my echo. Everything I do is quieter now," she said to the other women in the closet.

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.

Expensive restaurants have bigger gaps between the tables. First class on airplanes has no middle seats. Exclusive hotels have separate entrances for guests staying in suites. The most expensive thing you can buy in the most densely populated places on the planet is distance.

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

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.

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

We are asleep until we fall in love.

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

This book is dedicated to the voices inside my head, the most remarkable of my friends. And to my wife, who lives with us.

Not knowing is a good place to start.

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

Because that was a parent’s job: to provide shoulders. Shoulders for your children to sit on when they’re little so they can see the world, then stand on when they get older so they can reach the clouds, and sometimes lean against whenever they stumble and feel unsure.

When you're a child you long to be an adult and decide everything for yourself, but when you're an adult you realize that's the worst part of it.

Love is wanting you to exist.

You don't have to like all children. Just one. And children don't need the world's best parents, just their own parents. To be perfectly honest with you, what they need most of the time is a chauffeur.

He said that even if he knew that the world was going to hell tomorrow, he’d plant an apple tree today.

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.

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.

because although you might be able to drum religion into people, you can’t teach faith.

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.

Then she thought about an American author who had written that loneliness is like starvation, you don’t realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.

It just hurts so much at times, being human. Not understanding yourself, not liking the body you’re stuck in. Seeing your eyes in the mirror and wondering whose they are, always with the same question: “What’s wrong with me? Why do I feel like this?

But if there’s one thing modern life and the Internet have taught us, it’s that you should never expect to win a discussion simply because you’re right.

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.

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.

You don't have to prove anything to anyone anymore. You're good enough.

Do you know what the worst thing about being a parent is? That you're always judged by your worst moments. 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. We don't take our eyes off them for days at a time, but then you read just one text message and it's as if all your best moments never happened. 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.

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.

That we do our best. We plant an apple tree today, even if we know the world is going to be destroyed tomorrow. We save those we can.

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.

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.

Nothing must happen to you No, what am I saying Everything must happen to you And it must be wonderful

We can't change the world, and a lot of the time we can't even change people. No more than one bit at a time. So we do what we can to help whenever we get the chance, sweetheart. We save those we can. We do our best. Then we try to find a way to convince ourselves that that will just have to...be enough. So we can live with our failures without drowning.

Sometimes it’s easier to live with your own anxieties if you know that no one else is happy either.

children used to be punished by being sent to their rooms, but these days you have to force children to come out of them. One generation got told off for not being able to sit still, the next gets told off for never moving.

We're trying to be grown-up and love each other and understand how the hell you're supposed to insert USB leads. We're looking for something to cling on to, something to fight for, something to look forward to. We're doing all we can to teach our children how to swim. We have all of this in common, yet most of us remain strangers, we never know what we do to each other, how your life is affected by mine. Perhaps we hurried past each other in a crowd today, and neither of us noticed, and the fibers of your coat brushed against mine for single moment and then we were gone. I don't know who you are. But when you get home this evening, when this day is over and the night takes us, allow yourself a deep breath. Because we made it through this day as well. There'll be another one along tomorrow.

But when you get home this evening, when this day is over and the night takes us, allow yourself a deep breath. Because we made it through this day as well. There'll be another one along tomorrow.

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

Parents are defined by their mistakes.

Addicts are addicted to their drugs, and their families are addicted to hope.

You can always tell by the way people who love each other argue: the longer they’ve been together, the fewer words they need to start a fight.

The most expensive thing you can buy in the most densely populated places on the planet is distance.

My mom always says I should never apologize for myself. Never say sorry for being good at something.

I've learned that it helps to talk about [anxiety]. Unfortunately I think most people would still get more sympathy from their colleagues and bosses at work if they show up looking rough one morning and say 'I'm hungover' than if they say 'I'm suffering from anxiety.' But I think we pass people in the street every day who feel the same as you and I, many of them just don't know what it is. Men and women going around for months having trouble breathing and seeing doctor after doctor because they think there's something wrong with their lungs. All because it's so damn difficult to admit that something else is...broken. That it's an ache in our soul, invisible lead weights in our blood, an indescribable pressure in our chest. Our brains are lying to us, telling us we're going to die. But there's nothing wrong with our lungs, Zara.

Because you’ve probably been depressed yourself, you’ve had days when you’ve been in terrible pain in places that don’t show up in X-rays, when you can’t find the words to explain it even to the people who love you. Deep down, in memories that we might prefer to suppress even from ourselves, a lot of us know that the difference between us and that man on the bridge is smaller than we might wish.

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. We're not in control.

He was my echo. Everything I do is quieter now,

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.

It’s hard to explain to a twelve-year-old that when you were little and I walked too fast, you would run to catch up with me and take hold of my hand, and that those were the best moments of my life. Your fingertips in the palm of my hand. Before you knew how many things I’d failed at.

...The following morning they were angry at the sun for rising, and couldn't forgive the world for living on without her.

...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 need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday.

You probably have someone in your life whom you’d do something stupid for.

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.

Have you ever thought about how vegans always talk about saving the planet, as if the planet needed you? The planet will survive for billions of years even without human help. The only people we're killing are ourselves.

Having a purpose. A goal. A direction. And do you want to know the truth? The truth is that far more people would rather be rich than happy.

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

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

... seeing as dads like teaching their sons things, because the moment we can no longer do that is when they stop being our responsibility and we become theirs.

You need psychology if you think you're a dolphin. You need psychiatry if you've killed all the dolphins

...today’s youngsters had far too much choice, that was the whole problem (...) If you’re constantly presented with alternatives, you can never make up your mind.

Being seen through isn’t pleasant, you tend to pull your clothes a little tighter when it happens, especially if you’re usually the one who sees through other people.

Older men rarely know what to say to younger men to let them know that they care. It's so hard to find the words when all you really want to say is: 'I can see you're hurting.

...you can't protect your kids from life, because life gets us all in the end.

if the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, that’s probably because it’s full of shit

At the end of your career you’re trying to find a point to it all, and at the start of it you’re looking for a purpose.

And I… damn, I love being boring with Ro. Does that sound mad? I love arguing with her about sofas and pets. She’s my everyday. The whole… world.

. . . 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. We've created lives where we can watch other people crash into the wall but still hope that somehow we're going to pass straight through it. The closer we get, the more confidently we believe that some unlikely solution is miraculously going to save us, while everyone watching us is just waiting for the crash." . . . So Zara asked, without any sarcasm, "Have you learned any theories about why people behave like that, then?" "Hundreds," The psychologist smiled. "Which one do you believe?" "I believe the one that says that if you do it for long enough, it can become impossible to tell the difference between flying and falling.

Why would I need help to stop getting into conflicts? Conflicts are good. Only weak people believe in harmony, and as a reward they get to float through life with a feeling of moral superiority while the rest of us get on with other things.

There were no fancy certificates hanging on the walls; for some reason it’s always the people with the most impressive diplomas who keep them in their desk drawers.

Bridges exist to bring people closer together, he said.

Some people want to decide for themselves how happy they are.

Estelle was thinking about another author now, one who almost a hundred years ago wrote that your children aren’t your children, they’re the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.

Not that I wanted that. To be a boss, I mean. The president of the company said that was precisely why he wanted me to do it. He said you don't have to lead by telling people what to do, you can lead by just letting them do what they're capable of instead. So I tried to be a teacher more than a boss...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.

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

democracy as a system is doomed, because idiots will believe anything as long as the story’s good enough.

Parenthood can lead to a sequence of years when the children's feelings suck all the oxygen out of a family, and that can be so emotionally intense that some adults go for years without having an opportunity to tell anyone about their own feelings, and if you don't get a chance for long enough, sometimes you simply forget how to do it.

One technique I’d recommend is to ask yourself three questions before you flare up. One: are the actions of the person in question intended to harm you personally? Two: do I possess all of the information about the situation? Three: do you have anything to gain from a conflict?

The real estate agent takes a deep breath and says what women usually say to men who never seem to think that their lack of knowledge should get in the way of a confident opinion. “I’m sure you’re right.

Because everyone loves someone, and anyone who loves someone has had those desperate nights where we lie awake trying to figure out how we can afford to carry on being human beings. Sometimes that makes us do things that seem ridiculous in hindsight, but which felt like the only way out at the time.

Maybe I just don’t think it’s worth the effort to talk to people I’m only going to get fed up with.

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.

If you’re constantly presented with alternatives, you can never make up your mind,

so if the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, that's probably because it's full of shit.

The realization that you will, from that moment on, draw all your breaths through someone else’s lungs hits you harder when you aren’t prepared.

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 mustn’t tell lies, you mustn’t steal, you mustn’t kill, and you mustn’t throw stones at birds. We all agree on that. Except maybe swans, because swans can actually be passive-aggressive little bastards.

Sometimes I don't think I'm ready for the responsibility--I mean, I think my phone is asking too much of me when it wants me to install an update, and I find myself yelling: 'You're suffocating me.' You can't shout that at a child. And children have to be updated all the time, because they can kill themselves just crossing the street or eating a peanut! I've mislaid my phone three times already today, I don't know if I'm ready for a human being.

Perhaps you, too, have children, in which case you'll know that you're frightened the whole time, frightened of not knowing everything and of not having the energy to do everything and of not coping with everything. 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. So every so often they do tiny, tiny things at the most peculiar times, to buoy us up a little. Just enough to stop us from drowning.

Humor is the soul's last line of defense, and as long as we're laughing we're alive

People need bureaucracy, to give them time to think before they do something stupid.

Do you know how many men like you every single woman on the planet meets every day, who think that every thought that pops into your tiny little male brains is a lovely present you can give us?

The truth of course is that if people really were as happy as they look on the Internet, they wouldn't spend so much time on the Internet, because no one who's having a really good day spends half of it taking pictures of themselves.

She had been to sea with sailors, in the desert with soldiers, in prison with inmates, and in hospitals with sinners and atheists. She liked a drink and could tell dirty jokes, no matter who she was with. If anyone even asked what God would think about that, she always replied: I don't think we agree about everything, but I have a feeling He knows I'm doing the best I can. And I think maybe He knows I work for Him, because I try to help people.

if you do it for long enough, it can become impossible to tell the difference between flying and falling.

All interesting people have done something really stupid at least once!

And because the girls loved their mom, of course they did as she wanted, or at least pretended to, then did the exact opposite, because it's the duty of children not to pay the slightest bit of attention to their parents.

She remembered when she used to read bedtime stories to the children, 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. All that awaited her were a thousand sunrises where life is a beautiful prison.

The bank robber undeniably had a point. 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?

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.

She isn't traumatized, she isn't weighed down by any obvious grief. She's just sad, all the time. An evil little creature that wouldn't have shown up on any X-rays was living in her chest, rushing through her blood and filling her head with whispers, saying she wasn't good enough, that she was weak and ugly and would never be anything but broken. 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. In the end you get exhausted from always tensing the skin around your ribs, never letting your shoulders sink, brushing along walls all your life with white knuckles, always afraid that someone will notice you, because no one's supposed to do that. All Nadia knew was that she had never felt like someone who had anything in common with anyone else. She had always been entirely alone in every emotion. She sat in a classroom full of her contemporaries, looking like everything was the same as usual, but inside she was standing in a forest screaming until her heart burst. The trees grew until one day the sunlight could no longer break through the foliage, and the darkness in here became impenetrable.

Over time she realized that deep down almost everyone asks themselves the same sort of questions: Am I good? Do I make anyone proud? Am I useful to society? Am I good at my job? Generous and considerate? A decent shag? Does anyone want me to be their friend? Have I been a good parent? Am I a good person?

He presses his thumbs hard against his eyebrows, as if he hopes they're two buttons and if he keeps them pressed at the same time for ten seconds he'll be able to restore life to its factory settings.

He sometimes thinks it's impossible to know if children end up completely different despite the fact that they grew up together, or precisely because of that.

...it's possible to end your life by mistake, but you have to choose to jump.

that up to a certain age a child loves you unconditionally and hopelessly for one single reason: you’re theirs.

But it had been a long day, they had heard one another's stories and that made it harder to dislike one another, so Julia said something incredibly generous instead.

[My dad] says you end up marrying the one you don't understand. Then you spend the rest of your life trying.

Sometimes we don't need distance, just barriers

...no one in the world shared her prospects, and that’s the greatest loneliness in the world: when no one is walking beside you toward your destination.

Everyone gets a few moments that show who they really are, tiny instances that reveal their entire soul.

Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.

The following morning they were angry at the sun for rising, and couldn’t forgive the world for living on without her.

One day becomes another, now becomes then.

Sometimes it hurts, it really hurts, for no other reason than the fact that our skin doesn't feel like it's ours.

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

You can’t carry the guilt and the shame and the unbearable silence on your own, and you shouldn’t have to,

No one can really explain, either before or after, what makes a teenager stop wanting to be alive. It just hurts so much at times, being human. Not understanding yourself, not liking the body you're stuck in. Seeing your eyes in the mirror and wondering whose they are, always with the same question: 'What's wrong with me? Why do I feel like this?

I don't have the words to describe it, but it was like going on a journey with someone. Where didn't matter. To outer space. It went on for a long time. I started to fold down the corners of pages when there was a bit I really liked, and he started to write little comments in the margins. Just the odd word. 'Beautiful.' 'True.' That's the power of literature, you know, it can act like little love letters between people who can only explain their feelings by pointing at other people's.

A thoughtless adult had told her that a person who's drowning doesn't look like they're drowning. 'When you're drowning you can't call for help, you can't wave your arms, you just sink. your family can be standing on the beach waving cheerfully to you, completely unaware that you're dying.' Nadia had felt like that all her life. She had lived among them. Had sat at the dinner table with her parents, thinking: Can't you see? But they didn't see, and she didn't' say anything.

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 stuck with each other long enough it can seem like there’s no difference between no longer arguing and no longer caring.

If anyone asked her to sum up her view of the world, she always quoted Martin Luther: “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.

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.

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

He had underlined one sentence, several hundred pages in: We are asleep until we fall in love. Estelle gave him a book

It may not be the sort of love story anyone would write poetry about. But they floored each other there and then.

Somewhere, in some sort of Heaven, Estelle will be listening to music with one man and talking about literature with another. She’s earned that.

The stupidest thing people who have everything think about people who have nothing is that it's pride that stops a person from asking for help.

If you had to try things out and read things and find out the truth about things, then you’d never have time to have an opinion about anything.

And when you’re standing there, in the storage section at IKEA, don’t focus too much on the furniture. Focus on the fact that you’ve actually found someone who can see themselves storing their crap in the same place as your crap. Because, hand on heart: you have a lot of crap.

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 one even faster

In his youth Jim had dreams of becoming a writer. In fact he was still dreaming about that until long into Jack’s childhood. Then he started to dream that Jack might become a writer instead. 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.

...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 (...) 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.Sometimes it hurts, it really hurts, for no other reason than the fact that our skin doesn’t feel like it’s ours. Sometimes we panic, because the bills need paying and we have to be grown-up and we don’t know how, because it’s so horribly, desperately easy to fail at being grown-up.

When his daughter was a teenager, Jim used to think that children were like kites, so he held on to the string as tightly as he could, but eventually the wind carried her off anyway. She pulled free and flew off into the sky. It's hard to tell exactly when a person's substance abuse begins, which is why everyone is lying when they say: "I've got it under control." Drugs are a sort of dusk that grant us the illusion that we're the ones who decide when the light goes out, but that power never belongs to us. The darkness takes us whenever it likes.

Do you know what the worst thing about being a parent is? That you're always judged by your worst moments....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.

...the poor get poorer, the rich get richer, and the real class divide is between those who can borrow money and those who can’t. Because no matter how much money anyone earns, they still lie awake at the end of the month worrying about money. Everyone looks at what their neighbors have and wonders, ‘How can they afford that?’ because everyone is living beyond their means. So not even really rich people ever feel really rich, because in the end the only thing you can buy is a more expensive version of something you’ve already got. With borrowed money.

she also felt like telling him that the economic system she has devoted her life to working in is the world’s biggest problem right now, because we made the system too strong. We forgot how greedy we are, but above all we forgot how weak we are. And now it’s crushing us.

And a mortgage used to be something you were expected to repay. But now that every other middle-income family has a mortgage for an amount they couldn't possibly save up in their lifetimes, then the bank isn't lending money anymore. It's offering financing. And then homes are no longer homes. They're investments. ...It means that the poor get poorer, the rich get richer, and the real class divide is between those who can borrow money and those who can't. Because no matter how much money anyone earns, they still lie awake at the end of the month worrying about money. Everyone looks at what their neighbors have and wonders, "How can they afford that?" because everyone is living beyond their means. So not even really rich people ever feel really rich, because in the end the only thing you can buy is a more expensive version of something you've already got. With borrowed money.

He said you don’t have to lead by telling other people what to do, you can lead by just letting them do what they’re capable of instead

Because you dance with the person you went to the party with. And I went with Knut.

It’s so hard to find the words when all you really want to say is: ‘I can see you’re hurting.

You're the worst hostages ever!

Once the frog said she’d heard an adult on the bus say “love hurts,” and the monkey replied that maybe that’s why hearts end up jagged when you try to draw them.

We plant an apple tree today, even if we know the world is going to be destroyed tomorrow. We save those we can.

It’s hard to tell exactly when a person’s substance abuse begins, which is why everyone is lying when they say: “I’ve got it under control.” Drugs are a sort of dusk that grant us the illusion that we’re the ones who decide when the light goes out, but that power never belongs to us. The darkness takes us whenever it likes.

Falling in love is magical, after all, romantic, breathtaking … but falling in love and love are different. Aren’t they? Don’t they have to be? Good grief, no one could cope with being newly infatuated, year after year. When you’re infatuated you can’t think about anything else, you forget about your friends, your work, your lunch. If we were infatuated all the time we’d starve to death. And being in love means being infatuated … from time to time. You have to be sensible. The problem is that everything is relative, happiness is based on expectations, and we have the Internet now. A whole world constantly asking us: ‘But is your life as perfect as this? Well? How about now? Is it as perfect as this? If it isn’t, change it!

later, that would end up with one of us winning. And no marriage can survive that.” “Did it work?” Julia asked. “I don’t know,” Estelle admitted. “No?” “We never got past the first flush of infatuation

We’re looking for something to cling on to, something to fight for, something to look forward to. We’re doing all we can to teach our children how to swim. We have all of this in common, yet most of us remain strangers, we never know what we do to each other, how your life is affected by mine.

They go and see something made up. Because people need stories, too, sometimes. In the darkness of the auditorium they hold hands. For Anna-Lena it feels like coming home, and for Roger, like being good enough.

Stockholm' is, after all, an expression more than it is a place, both for men like Roger and for most of the rest of us, just a symbolic word to denote all the irritating people who get in the way of our happiness.

Because you've probably been depressed yourself, you've had days when you've been in terrible pain in places that don't show up in X-rays, when you can't find the words to explain it even to the people who love you.

...if there's one thing modern life and the Internet have taught us, it's that you should never expect to win a discussion simply because you're right.

I heard a man who worked in a casino say that no one gets ruined by losing, they get ruined by trying to win back the money they lost. Is that what you mean? Is that

Spring arrives. It always finds us, in the end. The wind sweeps winter away, the trees rustle and birds start making a fuss, and nature suddenly crashes through with a deafening roar where the snow has swallowed every echo for months.

Nothing in the world is so irresistibly contagious as laughter and food humor. Then she thought about and American author who had written that loneliness is like starvation, you don’t realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.

Sometimes it hurts, it really hurts, for no other reason than the fact that our skin doesn't feel like it's ours. Sometimes we panic, because the bills need paying and we have to be grown-up and we don't know how, because it's so horribly, desperately easy to fail at being grown-up.

The new year arrives, which of course never means as much as you hope unless you happen to sell calendars. One day becomes another, now becomes then. Winter spreads out across the town like a relative with slightly too much self-confidence,

When Knut was lying in his sickbed those last nights, she asked him: "Are you scared?" He replied: "Yes." Then his fingers ran through her hair and he added: "But it'll be quite nice to get a bit of peace and quiet. You can put that on the headstone." Estelle laughed hard at that. 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.

And… winners earn a lot of money, which is also important, I assume? What do you do with yours?” “I buy distance from other people.” The psychologist had never heard that response before. “How do you mean?” “Expensive restaurants have bigger gaps between the tables. First class on airplanes has no middle seats. Exclusive hotels have separate entrances for guests staying in suites. The most expensive thing you can buy in the most densely populated places on the planet is distance.

She could see winter making itself comfortable across the town. She liked the silence of this time of year, but had never appreciated its smugness. When the snow arrives autumn has already done all the work, taking care of all the leaves and carefully sweeping summer away from people’s memories. All winter had to do was roll in with a bit of freezing weather and take all the credit, like a man who’s spent twenty minutes next to a barbecue but has never served a full meal in his life.

If anyone even asked what God would think about that, she always replied: “I don’t think we agree about everything, but I have a feeling He knows I’m doing the best I can. And I think maybe He knows I work for Him, because I try to help people.

She's just scared she isn't good enough for you and the baby. You need to tell her that's nonsense. She's worried she won't be able to mend the baseboards herself, so you'll just have to tell her that no one can fix the damn baseboards until they've done it once. Everybody has to start somewhere.

Even astonishingly late in life, people seem incapable of considering that their parents might not be super-smart and really funny and immortal. Perhaps there’s a biological reason for that, that up to a certain age a child loves you unconditionally and hopelessly for one single reason: you’re theirs.

All Nadia knew was that she had never felt like someone who had anything in common with anyone else. She had always been entirely alone in every emotion. She sat in a classroom full of her contemporaries, looking like everything was the same as usual, but inside she was standing in a forest screaming until her heart burst. The trees grew until one day the sunlight could no longer break through the foliage, and the darkness in there became impenetrable.

So it’s without superpowers that you come home from the hospital with your newborn child and feel utterly abandoned and terrified. You look at the hospital staff as they discharge you from the maternity ward like they’re leaving you to die in the desert.

She was just one person out of several billion, and most people never become individuals to us. They're just 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 we do to each other, with each other, for each other.

The only thing they really have in common is moral hazard. That’s a banking term, of course. Someone had to come up with it to describe the way the financial markets work, because the fact that banks are immoral is so obvious to us that simply calling them “immoral” wasn’t enough. We needed a way to describe the fact that it’s so unlikely that a bank would ever behave morally that it can only be considered a risk for them even to try.

Because even if twenty-year-olds can be wrong about a lot of things in life (and those of us who aren’t twenty can probably agree that most twenty-year-olds are wrong so often that most of them would have just a one in four chance of answering a yes or no question correctly

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.

Everyone has Stockholmers in their life, even people from Stockholm have their own Stockholmers. only to the it's 'people who live in New York' or 'politicians in Brussels', or other people from some other place where people seem to think that they're better than the Stockholmers think they are.

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 difference, because now we’ve learned that every day needs to be special. Every day.

They’ve said and written grand, wonderful things. I hope you get to read and hear all of them, because there’s something so special in that experience, in falling in love with words. Feeling them like fluttering butterflies beneath your skin. Like whirlwinds in your head. Like a punch to the gut.

By this point in the conversation, the bank robber was starting to feel very old, especially since the twenty-year-old on the other side of the conversation gave the impression that she was fourteen years old. Which of course she wasn't, but the bank robber was thirty-nine, and had therefore reached an age where there's suddenly very little difference between fourteen and twenty. That's what makes a person feel old.

It was a day completely devoid of weather. During some weeks in winter in the central part of Scandinavia the sky doesn’t seem to bother even attempting to impress us, it greets us with the color of newspaper in a puddle, and dawn leaves behind it a fog as if someone has been setting fire to ghosts.

It stuck with Jim that today's youngsters had far too much choice, that was the whole problem--if all those modern dating apps had existed when Jims' wife first met him, she would never have ended up becoming his wife. If you're constantly presented with alternatives, you can never make up your mind, Jim thought.

Estelle smiled feebly. If you’ve lived with teenagers, you know they only exist for themselves, and their parents have their hands full dealing with the various horrors of life. Both the teenagers’ and their own. There was no place for Estelle there, she was mostly something of a nuisance. They were pleased that she answered the phone when they called on her birthday, but the rest of the time they assumed time stood still for her. She was a nice ornament that they only took out at Christmas and Midsummer.

We want you to be better than us. Because if our kids don’t grow up to be better than us, then what’s the point of all this? We want you to be kinder, smarter, more humble, more generous, and more selfless than we are. We want to give you the very best circumstances we can possibly provide. So we follow sleeping methods and go to seminars and buy ergonomic bathtubs and push car-seat salesmen up against the wall and shout, ‘The safest! I want THE SAFEST, doyouhearme?!’ (Not that I’ve ever done that, of course; you shouldn’t pay so much attention to what your mother says.)

Because 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. Because I honestly

The truth. There isn’t any. All we’ve managed to find out about the boundaries of the universe is that it hasn’t got any, and all we know about God is that we don’t know anything. So the only thing a mom who was a priest demanded of her family was simple: that we do our best. We plant an apple tree today, even if we know the world is going to be destroyed tomorrow. We save those we can.

sort of thing’s impossible to control, just like love. 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. The truth. There isn’t any. All we’ve managed to find out about the boundaries of the universe is that it hasn’t got any, and all we know about God is that we don’t know anything. So the only thing a mom who was a priest demanded of her family was simple: that we do our best. We plant an apple tree today, even if we know the world is going to be destroyed tomorrow. We save those we can.

She was thinking about everything Ro had told her that night, the incomprehensible cruelties that terrible people are capable of inflicting on each other, and the utter insanity of war. Then she thought of how Ro, after all that, had somehow managed to grow up to be the sort of person who made other people laugh. Because her parents had taught her during their flight through the mountains that 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.

Addicts are good at lying, but never as good as their children. It's their sons and daughters who have to come up with excuses, never too outlandish or incredible, always mundane enough for no one to want to check them. An addict's child's homework never gets eaten by the dog, they just forgot their backpack at home. Their mom didn't miss parents' evening because she was kidnapped by ninjas, but because she had to work overtime. The child doesn't remember the name of the place she's working, it's only a temporary job. She does her best, Mom does, to support us now that Dad's gone, you know. You soon learn how to phrase things in such a way as to preclude any follow-up questions. You learn that the women in the welfare office can take you away from her if they find out she managed to set fire to your last apartment when she fell asleep with a cigarette in her hand, or if they find out she stole the Christmas ham from the supermarket. So you lie when the security guard comes, you take the ham off her, and confess: 'It was me who took it.' No one calls the police for a child, not when it's Christmas. So they let you go home with your mom, hungry but not alone.

Unfortunately I think most people would still get more sympathy from their colleagues and bosses at work if they show up looking rough one morning and say ‘I’m hungover’ than if they say ‘I’m suffering from anxiety.’ But I think we pass people in the street every day who feel the same as you and I, many of them just don’t know what it is.

An evil little creature that wouldn’t have shown up on any X-rays was living in her chest, rushing through her blood and filling her head with whispers, saying she wasn’t good enough, that she was weak and ugly and would never be anything but broken. 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.

When we first fell in love, Knut and I reached an agreement about how we were allowed to argue, because Knut said that sooner or later the first flush of infatuation wears off and you end up arguing whether you like it or not. So we came to an agreement, like the Geneva Convention, where the rules of war were agreed. Knut and I promised that no matter how angry we got, we weren’t allowed to consciously say things just to hurt each other. We weren’t allowed to argue just for the sake of winning. Because, sooner or later, that would end up with one of us winning. And no marriage can survive that.

And that’s the weirdest thing about being someone’s parent. Not just a bank robber parent, but any parent: that you are loved in spite of everything that you are. Even astonishingly late in life, people seem incapable of considering that their parents might not be super-smart and really funny and immortal. Perhaps there’s a biological reason for that, that up to a certain age a child loves you unconditionally and hopelessly for one single reason: you’re theirs. Which is a pretty smart move on biology’s part, you have to give it that.

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. Some of us never manage to get the chaos under control, so our lives simply carry on, the world spinning through space at two million miles an hour while we bounce about on its surface like so many lost socks. 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. We’re not in control. So we learn to pretend, all the time, about our jobs and our marriages and our children and everything else. We pretend we’re normal, that we’re reasonably well educated, that we understand “amortization levels” and “inflation rates.” That we know how sex works. 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. (Wrong way round, wrong way round, wrong way round, there! In!) We pretend to be good parents when all we really do is provide our kids with food and clothing and tell them off when they put chewing gum they find on the ground in their mouths. We tried keeping tropical fish once and they all died. And we really don’t know more about children than tropical fish, so the responsibility frightens the life out of us each morning. 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.