Ikea Quotes

I still believe in the Holy Trinity, except now it's Target, Trader Joe's, and IKEA.

When life throws a wrench in your plans, catch it and build an IKEA bookshelf.

Well they're pissed off and they're hungry. I was kind of busy trying not to get my brains eaten. They seemed pretty adamant about the brain-eating thing. Then they're going to IKEA, I guess

We passed through a supermarket, a clothing boutique with the latest in Viking fashions, and an IKEA outlet (naturally).

We got to his place and it looked a lot like his personality. Just a bunch of space filler, nothing to really wow you. It looked like he had bought a lot of stuff from IKEA and then decided to refinish it at home. Everything was neat and tidy, but you wouldn't want any of it for yourself.

I wasn’t a big fan of women trying to fix men, to change them. I always figured there were guys enough out there, so I should look for a total package that was already fully Ikea-assembled—or go without.

You know what it’s like when you go to IKEA and you can’t believe how cheap everything is, and even though you may not need a hundred tea lights, my God, they’re only ninety-nine cents for the whole bag? Or: Sure the throw are filled with a squishy ball of no-doubt toxic whatnot, but they’re so bright and three-for-five-dollars that before you know it you've dropped five hundred bucks, not because you needed any of this crap, but because it was so damn cheap?

The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue.

¿Por qué nadie ha inventado el equivalente a Ikea para cuidar a los niños, el equivalente de Macintosh para hacer las tareas domésticas? La organización de la colectividad sigue siendo una prerrogativa masculina.

Lu must have picked up on my sadness. She gestured back to the rocking chair. “Well, I’ll let you two get on with the tour. Assembling this IKEA furniture is the toughest quest I’ve had in years.

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.

Armaeus is presently able to enter Hell bodily, as are you. Any properly equipped mortal may enter a portal at will. Once you’re inside, however, getting out is trickier.” I frowned. “So it’s like an IKEA store?” “In

...It's not that the worm forgives the plough; it gives it no mind. (Pain occurs, in passing.) (lines 37-39 in the poem 'Fantasia on a Theme from IKEA')

Some people have this sort of built-in GPS, a bit like cats. You can drop them anywhere and they can find their way home. Not me. I get lost in IKEA.

I quickly found myself in the center of the room, trussed up to a sturdy, high-backed chair, which Joaquin happily assured me was an original Louis the Fourteenth. Oh goody. I'd hate to die bound to something from IKEA.

For no real reason other than because of how striking he looks. He is just so . . . Scandinavian, maybe. Viking-like. Norse. Like his ancestors frolicked below the aurora borealis on their way to funding Ikea.

Joe you idiot!” He jumped up and down on the desk, waving his arms frantically. “Don’t you know that if you recite the Ikea catalog in the wrong order, you could accidentally summon a demon?

They studied the phenomenon at Harvard.” “They studied soul-stealing at Harvard?” “What else do you think they do in business school? In any case, it’s called the Ikea effect.” “As in furniture?

A slime-mold enthusiast told me about a test he had performed. He frequently got lost in IKEA stores and would spend many minutes trying to find the exit. He decided to challenge his slime molds with the same problem and built a maze based on the floor plan of his local IKEA. Sure enough, without any signs or staff to direct them, the slime molds soon found the shortest path to the exit. “You see,” he said with a laugh, “they’re cleverer than me.

Hi! I'm Ethan, I shop at Ikea. I bought a $300 dining suite and it took me three days to assemble!

But young women don’t want bone china anymore. They’ve no use for old Swedish things. They have their own dinnerware, probably from Ikea. New Swedish things.

Great, we’d stumbled into the Overworld version of Ikea. We were screwed; we were never getting out of here.

I swear to love you always. To back you up even when you're wrong. To make you laugh when you realize you've built that IKEA bookshelf all backwards. To indulge every whim and passion. And to always be your number one fan. Until death do us part, I will stand by your side.

If everyone wasn’t going in the same direction inside IKEA, there would be chaos, do you understand that? Civilization as we know it would collapse into a furious Judgement Day inferno of shadows and fire.

Questing is hard. Fortunately, Thomas is here to spoon-feed them answers. We're one step away from him giving them an instruction sheet by Ikea, with cartoonish diagrams and a little goddess-slaying allen wrench.

We're here to tell you what to do if a worm-hole opens up on your shift!

He had decided that if he ever returned to his old job he would create a special level of hell, an enormous inescapable shop of attractive but useless and overpriced items that the damned would wander for eternity in the cold delusion that this was what they wanted. And then Nerys had taken him to IKEA and Clovenhoof realised the humans had once again beaten him to it.

The second prong in my revised Trinity is IKEA, the Swedish home store monolith. If you're unfamiliar, they carry every single thing you could possibly ever need to fill your home and garden at low, low prices, but in obscure Swedish sizes so those items won't coordinate with anything else you own, like, say, if you want to put a regular Target lamp shade on your IKEA lamp. Fletch thinks it's Sweden's master plan to make Americans so busy trying to construct furniture with Allen wrenches that we don't notice they've invaded us. (Personally, I think it's payback; the Swedes are pissed that we aren't buying ABBA albums anymore.)

Okay, so, I’m in Ikea, right?” Anh started, looking done with life. “And I’m trying to pronounce some of the names on these tags. Somehow—I have no idea how—but somehow I managed to summon a demon. He’s demanding the reason for his summons. What do I do with him?

A better everyday life means getting away from status and conventions -- being freer and more at ease as human beings.

IKEA,” chanted the dead. “First we feast, then IKEA. First we feast, then IKEA.

For all I knew, Ikea was mass-producing a flat-pack lean-to called the ‘Fükd’ just for the occasion.

Look at this. A barstool, named Sven? Some old Swedish custom, the winter kicks in, weather gets harsh, after a while you find yourself relating to the furniture in ways you didn't expect?

I can follow pretty much every programming language out there, I can make a two-hundred-year-old diary out of some really nasty ingredients, I can even make sense out of the instruction booklets that come with IKEA furniture, but I can*not* make heads or tails of this nonsense right here.

I have a mother,"replied Hamlet gloomily as he bowed politely and kissed my mother's hand."She shares my uncle's bed." "They should buy another one, in that case," she replied, practical as ever. "They do a very good deal at IKEA, I'm told. ...

But even while Rome is burning, there’s somehow time for shopping at IKEA. Social imperatives are a merciless bitch. Everyone is attempting to buy what no one can sell.  See, when I moved out of the house earlier this week, trawling my many personal belongings in large bins and boxes and fifty-gallon garbage bags, my first inclination was, of course, to purchase the things I still “needed” for my new place. You know, the basics: food, hygiene products, a shower curtain, towels, a bed, and umm … oh, I need a couch and a matching leather chair and a love seat and a lamp and a desk and desk chair and another lamp for over there, and oh yeah don’t forget the sideboard that matches the desk and a dresser for the bedroom and oh I need a coffeetable and a couple end tables and a TV-stand for the TV I still need to buy, and don’t these look nice, whadda you call ’em, throat pillows? Oh, throw pillows. Well that makes more sense. And now that I think about it I’m going to want my apartment to be “my style,” you know: my own motif, so I need certain decoratives to spruce up the decor, but wait, what is my style exactly, and do these stainless-steel picture frames embody that particular style? Does this replica Matisse sketch accurately capture my edgy-but-professional vibe? Exactly how “edgy” am I? What espresso maker defines me as a man? Does the fact that I’m even asking these questions mean I lack the dangling brass pendulum that’d make me a “man’s man”? How many plates/cups/bowls/spoons should a man own? I guess I need a diningroom table too, right? And a rug for the entryway and bathroom rugs (bath mats?) and what about that one thing, that thing that’s like a rug but longer? Yeah, a runner; I need one of those, and I’m also going to need…

You see, Squirt, there's heaven, and then there's hell. Hell is where they send all the bad people, like criminals and con artists and parking inspectors. And heaven is where they send all the good people, like you and me and that nice blonde from MasterChef. What happens when you get there? In heaven, you hang out with God and Jimi Hendrix, and you get to eat doughnuts whenever you want. In hell, you have to, uh . . . do the Macarena. Forever. To that "Grease Megamix." Where do you go if you're good and bad? What? I don't know. IKEA?

Il voyait déjà le best-seller sur les étagères des plus grosses librairies, traduit en trente-deux langues, dont l'ayapaneco, ancien dialecte mexicain qui n'était plus parlé que par deux personnes au monde, qui ne savaient pas lire.

The Tote End itself was demolished in the nineties. Sadly a monstrous IKEA store now stands in it's place. Where once tribes of youths performed their rites of passage and bodily fluids flowed in the name of love, hate and pride; Justin and Kate bicker over which wood flooring they should choose. It fucking kills me.

I'd told Alex too about how much I loved my family, how protective I felt of them, but how even with them, I was sometimes a little lonely. Everyone else was someone else's top person. Mom and Dad. Parker and Prince. Even the huskies were paired up, while our terrier mix and the cat spent most days curled together in a sun patch. Before Alex, my family was the only place I belonged, but even with them, I was something of a loose part, that baffling extra bolt IKEA packs with your bookcase, just to make you sweat.

Once and for all, we have decided to side with the many.

Personas que conozco y que solían llevarse pornografía al cuarto de baño, ahora se llevan el catálogo de muebles de IKEA.

I was falling apart faster than an old IKEA dresser

Where do you go if you’re good and bad? What? I don’t know. IKEA?

Imagine Ikea if Ikea sold only stuffed animals.

She looks up at the sky, dark now. December is merciless. But she knows that IKEA is still open. A light out there, somewhere.

You've taken things apart and put them back together," Chinara reminded her. "Like Ikea furniture, not people!

Truthfully, Rahul was not an IKEA fan. In fact, he considered it the fourth circle of hell.

Falling in love comes with more instructions than an Ikea bookshelf.

For example, your mother once called my bluff and said, ‘ANYTHING?’ and I said, ‘ANYTHING EXCEPT IKEA!!!’ and then she made me take

The majority of things in life are about picking your battles. You'll learn that too. And that will never be clearer than when you're at IKEA. You'd have to visit a Danish vacation village after two weeks of pouring rain and no beer to come across as many couples arguing as you'll hear in the IKEA section for changeable sofa covers on any given Tuesday. People take this whole interior design thing really seriously these days. It's become a national pastime to over interpret the symbolism of the fact that "he wants frosted glass, that just proves he never listens to my FEELINGS." "Ahhhhh! She wants beech veneer. Do you hear me? Beech veneer! Sometimes, it feels like I've woken up next to a stranger!" That's how it is, every single time you go there. And I'm not going to lecture you, but if there's just one thing I can get across then let it be this: no one has ever, in the history of the world, had an argument in IKEA that really is about IKEA. People can say whatever they life, but when a couple who has been married for ten years walks around the bookshelves section calling one another words normally only used by alcoholic crime fiction detectives, they might be arguing about a number of things, but trust me: cupboard doors is not one of them. Believe me. You're a Backman. Regardless of how many shortcomings the person you fall in love with might have, I can guarantee that you still come out on top of that bargain. So find someone who doesn't love you for the person you are, but despite the person you are. 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.

Ich dachte, du ziehst es vor, C-Minus zu sprechen." "Das heißt C++", schalt sie ihn. "Ich weiß außerdem, dass Java mehr ist als nur Kaffee. Und Assembler nichts mit Ikea-Möbeln zu tun hat.

Cheap objects resist involvement. We tend to invest less in their purchase, care, and maintenance, and that's part of what makes them so attractive. Cheap clothing lines—sold at discounters such as Target and H & M—are like IKEA emblems of the "cheap chic" where styles fills in for whatever quality goes lacking. There is nothing sinister in this, no deliberate planned obsolescence. These objects are not designed to fall apart, nor are they crafted not to fall apart. In many cases we know this and accept it, and have entered into a sort of compact. Perhaps we don't even want the object to last forever. Such voluntary obsolescence makes craftsmanship beside the point. We have grown to expect and even relish the easy birth and early death of objects.

We go solo, my kinfolk and I, taking each day as an IKEA bookcase we build alone, sans instructions. The leftover pieces? We gobble them down, and sometimes it's the only thing we eat all day.

Dopiero w sklepie Flying Tiger znaleźliśmy odpowiedni model. Tiger to Ikea dwudziestego pierwszego wieku. Wyraża ducha epoki: zapomnij o kanapie, kup serpentynę, plastikowego wombata i kubełek.

It seems like a weird time to celebrate, and perhaps this is wildly inappropriate, but in the back of my mind, I make a mental note to finally get that IKEA couch I’ve been eyeing. It’ll look nice next to my bookshelves.

Plus, you don't go to Trader Joe's unless you're in it. It's grocery IKEA. Everybody knows that. You have to be prepared to fight. That's long relationship territory. Like, we're talking picking people up from the airport.

Or you and Greg have a role-play kink you expand out of the bedroom: you pretend to be a librarian at his grandma’s birthday, he spanks you with Billy the IKEA bookcase, orgasms are had. Consensual, Swedish, and above all: private.

Neki etnolog budućnosti će jednog dana izložiti madrac, plastičnu, plavu Ikea-vrećicu i laptop kao simbole moje generacije u ovom trenutku. Te tri stvari su naš posjed, pokretno sklonište. Sve drugo moramo naučiti ostaviti iza sebe.

Schon mit Anfang zwanzig hatte ich mich, nach meiner Niederlage gegen die bösartige Ikea-Hollywoodschaukel, in einer Therapie mit dem Unterschied von Drive und driven auseinandergesetzt. Ich hatte tief hineingeschaut in meine Kindheit und Jugend und wusste seitdem, dass ich zwei Arten von Ehrgeiz in mir trug. Eine helle, lustvolle und eine bedürftige, abhängige. Für diese zwei Arten von Ehrgeiz kennt die deutsche Sprache keine unterscheidenden Worte, und doch sind sie grundverschieden.

So I couldn’t just pack my blue IKEA sack and go—I had to do the right thing. I had to preserve what was left of the goodness in my soul. But for the record, this was exactly why I never wanted to have friends. So much for being an island. Thanks

She remembered her friend Ines talking about how, after her divorce, she’d constructed a desk from an IKEA flatpack on her own while playing ‘I Am Woman’, but then, after she was done, all she’d wanted to do was call her ex and tell him about it.

Chudí lidé, jako byli tihle dva, opravdu nemají vůbec nic. Chybí jim televize, penzijní spoření, dovolená v Chorvatsku, možnost závidět sousedům, dokonce i o designových předmětech z IKEA si mohou nechat jenom zdát. A tak už jim zbývá jen jediné - příležitosti být šťastní...

dumped an enormous IKEA package in the house: presumably it would change the landscape if and when I got up the energy to assemble it, but until then it was just there, in the middle of everything, where I barked my shin or banged my elbow on it every time I tried to get past.

Do you know how many IKEA stores there are in Sweden? No. Twenty. Do you know how many Roger and I have been to? No. All of them. Every single one. we went to the last one fairly recently, and I didn't think Roger had been keeping count, but when we were in the cafeteria having lunch Roger suddenly said we should each have a piece of cake as well. We never have cake in IKEA. We always have lunch, but never cake, And that was when I knew that he'd been keeping count. I know Roger doesn't seem romantic, but sometimes he can be the most romantic man on the planet, you know.

Sometimes we treat God like an antique chair, when, in fact, God is a lot more like an IKEA couch. I don’t mean in his worth or his beauty or his grandeur, of course—in every category he is beyond compare. But in terms of relationship, we often treat God more like an expensive antique, when he invites us to treat him like an IKEA couch.

She stood in our cramped little bathroom, a bag of cosmetics in hand. Putting on her makeup while asking if we should buy a couch meant she'd already made up her mind that we were going to IKEA today, and asking me if we ought to go was her way of saying "Get your shoes on." It's dizzying, all the versions of meanings available to the listener.

And you could do it. I promise. It’s not even that hard. I mean look at me.’ She directed my attention to her unclean clothes, her swollen chest, damp spots on the cushions and looked about to laugh, then like she was going to cry, then merely exhausted. I asked her what she wanted for her birthday. Ingrid said, ‘When is it?’ I told her it was tomorrow. ‘In that case, a bag of salty liquorice. The kind from Ikea.’ The baby squirmed and pulled off. Ingrid let out a little cry and covered her breast. I helped her turn the cushion around and once he was on again, I asked if I could get her a kind of liquorice that didn’t require a journey to Croydon. She did cry then, telling me through tears that if I understood what it was like, being woken up fifty times a night and having to feed a baby every two hours when it takes an hour and fifty-nine minutes and feels like being stabbed in the nipple with four hundred knives, then I would be like, do you know what? I think I will just get my sister the liquorice she specifically likes.

Tom has been having a difficult patch, and we meet at the church of IKEA as often as possible, because it is equidistant from our houses and always cheers us up. Yesterday I asked, 'In your depression, and with so many people having such a hard time, where is Advent?' He tried to wiggle out of it by saying, 'You Protestants and your little questions!' Then, when pushed, he said: 'Faith is a decision. Do we believe we are ultimately doomed and fucked and there's no way out? Or that God and goodness make a difference? There is heaven, community, and hope - and hope that there is life beyond the grave.' 'But Tom, at the same time, the grave is very real, dark and cold and lonely.' 'Advent is not for the naive. Because in spite of the dark and cold, we see light - you look up, or you make light, with candles, or with strands of lightbulbs on trees. And you give light. Beauty helps, in art and nature and faces. Friends help. Solidarity helps. If you ask me, when people return phone calls, it's about as good as it gets. And who knows beyond that.

Only while sleeping one makes no mistakes. Making mistakes is the privilege of the active — of those who can correct their mistakes and put them right.

The Tote End (a large and foreboding terrace at Eastville) itself was demolished in the nineties. Sadly a monstrous Ikea store now stands in it's place. Where once tribes of youths performed their rites of passage and bodily fluids flowed in the name of love, hate and pride; Justin and Kate bicker over which wood flooring they should choose. It fucking kills me.

You know you’re in a college town when there’s a restaurant called “Pancakea.” The establishment was a pancake/coffee house, and Choo, Molly, Sig, and I were sitting in a booth arguing about the place and its name and their relative merits. I thought the name was a take on panacea, implying that pancakes are a cure for everything. Sig thought the owner wanted the place to become the IKEA of pancakes. Molly thought that given how large the pancakes were, the title might be a riff on Pangea, the first continental landmass. We all agreed that the owner was probably an ex-college student who couldn’t get a job with his or her major, but we couldn’t agree on whether that major was philosophy, marketing, anthropology, or just heavy drinking.

It was chintz but not the cat-lady chintz I was used to. Perhaps it was Mrs. Bellrush’s manner or steely blue eyes but I got the distinct impression that this was aggressive chintz, warrior chintz, the kind of chintz that had gone out to conquer an Empire and still had the good taste to dress for dinner. Any IKEA flat-pack that showed its face around here was going to be kindling.

Uno experimenta un sentimiento de superioridad cuando hace un truco de magia. Sólo porque es el único en conocer el secreto. Y porque suscita la admiración. Ese sentimiento se convierte pronto en una droga.

Orsk svým zákazníkům sliboval "všechno, co potřebují k životu", ať se řečený život zrovna nacházel v libovolném stádiu - nabízel vše od kolébek Balsak až po houpací křesla Gutevol. Jediné, co v nabídce chybělo, byly rakve. Aspoň prozatím.

Orsk was the all-American furniture superstore in Scandinavian drag, offering well-designed lifestyles at below-Ikea prices, and its forward-thinking slogan promised “a better life for the everyone.” Especially for Orsk shareholders, who trekked to company headquarters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, every year to hear how their chain of Ikea knockoff stores was earning big returns. Orsk promised customers “the everything they needed” in the every phase of their lives, from Balsak cradles to Gutevol rocking chairs. The only thing it didn’t offer was coffins. Yet.

By letting the participants create their own follow-ups and time schedule, I’m trying to create a sense of ownership in them. This principle is known as the “IKEA Effect,” named for the home furnishings retailer whose products are notoriously difficult to assemble. The IKEA Effect states that by forcing consumers to play an active role in the assembly of their dresser or bookshelf, they will value the product more highly than if it were assembled in store.11 In a similar fashion, by creating their own deadlines, employees will be more motivated to meet them.

Everything else is Craftsman. Turn-of-the-century Craftsman, beautifully restored Craftsman, reinterpretation of Craftsman, needs-some-love Craftsman, modern take on Craftsman. It’s like a hypnotist put everyone from Seattle in a collective trance. You are getting sleepy, when you wake up you will want to live only in a Craftsman house, the year won’t matter to you, all that will matter is that the walls will be thick, the windows tiny, the rooms dark, the ceilings low, and it will be poorly situated on the lot. The main thing about this cornucopia of Craftsmans: compared to L.A., they were Ikea-cheap!

As he surveyed the world being remade by Silicon Valley, and especially what was once called the sharing economy, he began to see through the fantasy-speak. Here were a handful of companies thriving by serving as middlemen between people who wanted rides and people who offered them, people who wanted their Ikea furniture assembled and people who came over to install it, people who defrayed their costs by renting out a room and people who stayed there. It was no accident, Scholz believed, that these services had taken off at the historical moment that they had. An epic meltdown of the world financial system had cost millions of people their homes, jobs, and health insurance. And as the fallout from the crash spread, many of those cut loose had been drafted into joining a new American servant class. The precariousness at the bottom, which had shown few signs of improving several years after the meltdown, had become the fodder for a bounty of services for the affluent—and, Scholz noted, for the “channeling of wealth in fewer and fewer hands.” Somehow, the technologies celebrated by the Valley as leveling playing fields and emancipating people had fostered a slick new digitally enabled upstairs-downstairs line in American social life.

With his free hand, Thomas produces a small key. It’s like an elevator key, one of those round, single-purpose gizmos that don’t seem to have a reason for being except in an elevator, a device that brings to mind all the other silly little inventions: can openers, lemon zesters, melon ballers. Things that do only one thing. We have so many of them. Where do we get this shit? Bridal shower and wedding gifts, stocking stuffers, spur-of-the-moment purchases at Ikea. They’re all so goddamned useless, hidden in the backs of kitchen drawers, taken for granted and never taken out. This is what goes through my mind as Thomas frees me with the high-tech equivalent of a can opener.

pourquoi il n’y aurait pas de monde après le lycée ? – Parce que derrière les grilles du bahut, y a aucun destin fabuleux, style téléfilm à la con, qui nous attend. Juste cette salope de réalité, avec sa gueule d’acier qui va nous broyer. Mais j’irai pas manifester pour autant, et tu sais pourquoi ? Ils me font gerber, les pantins qui le font. Défiler bourré dans la rue, ça dérange les gens qui tra- vaillent, pas le gouvernement. Si ces imbéciles voulaient vraiment faire bouger les choses, ils retireraient leur fric de la banque, ils rendraient les clés de leur 60 m2 – qu’ils sont bien contents, d’ailleurs, de remplir de merdes Ikea – et ils iraient marcher sur l’Élysée flingue à la main.

The absolute success of these two movements is such that at this stage, "indie" and "yuppie" are meaningless designators. The yuppie aesthetic of connoisseurship has infiltrated everywhere and now there is only--for many of us--either luxury gelato or food made of chemical waste. Ikea, Martha Stewart, and Whole Foods make yuppiedom no longer a chic and extravagant choice but an enforced mode. It's either that or eat at a toxic toilet such as McDonald's. The indie aesthetic is likewise de rigueur. H&M, Urban Outfitters, and American Apparel sell the floppy "Brit on a holiday" look to all Americans. Radiohead and Arcade Fire music is blasted from speakers at stadiums. For many poor souls, there is no alternative to the alternative.

One thing had always confused Quentin about the magic he read about in books: it never seemed especially hard to do. There were lots of furrowed brows and thick books and long white beards and whatnot, but when it came right down to it, you memorized the incantation—or you just read it off the page, if that was too much trouble—you collected the herbs, waved the wand, rubbed the lamp, mixed the potion, said the words—and just like that the forces of the beyond did your bidding. It was like making salad dressing or driving stick or assembling Ikea furniture—just another skill you could learn. It took some time and effort, but compared to doing calculus, say, or playing the oboe—well, there really was no comparison. Any idiot could do magic.

He smiled through his greasy glasses with his clear eyes. “Why do we all expect to be happy? We all came out of our mothers crying. Pain is what we do.” It reminded me of a tweet from Alain Botton several years back that sparked a Twitter chat between the two of us: “Happiness is generally impossible for longer than fifteen minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.” Indeed. The great worriers of history were the ones who saw the charging rhinoceros first, had an action plan ready to go should a tiger in camp, fretted that the basket of weeds collected that they may be poisonous. We carry this terror in our genes into our suburban lounge rooms, to our office water coolers, to our IKEA-issue bedrooms. Worry is our default position.

He took a trip ... up to ... Elliott's house, his mansion rather. Awful place, twelve bedrooms and swimming pool and media hall and five car garage, but cheap and shoddy all the same, like the one next door and next door to that. A row of Ikea houses, such wealthy mediocrity. His very own son. His big, bald son. Who could believe it. The bigness, the baldness, the stupidity. In a house designed to bore the daylight out of visitors, no character at all, all blonde wood and fluorescent lighting and clean white machinery. Not to mention his brand new wife, number three, a clean white machine herself. Up from the cookie cutter and into Elliott's life, she might as well have jumped out of the microwave, her skin orange, her teeth pearly white. A trophy wife. But why the word "trophy"? Something to shoot on a safari.

The first involves streamlining operations and introducing cost innovations from manufacturing to distribution. Can the product’s or service’s raw materials be replaced by unconventional, less expensive ones—such as switching from metal to plastic or shifting a call center from the UK to Bangalore? Can high-cost, low-value-added activities in your value chain be significantly eliminated, reduced, or outsourced? Can the physical location of your product or service be shifted from prime real estate locations to lower-cost locations, as The Home Depot, IKEA, and Walmart have done in retail or Southwest Airlines has done by shifting from major to secondary airports? Can you truncate the number of parts or steps used in production by shifting the way things are made, as Ford did by introducing the assembly line? Can you digitize activities to reduce costs? By

Para alguém de um país ocidental com tendência democrática, o senhor Ikea desenvolvera um conceito comercial no mínimo insólito: a visita forçada ao seu estabelecimento. Assim, se quisesse aceder à zona de self-service situada no rés do chão, o cliente era obrigado a subir ao primeiro andar, percorrer um gigantesco e interminável corredor que serpenteava entre quartos, salas e cozinhas em exposição, cada espaço mais bonito do que o anterior, passar por um restaurante aliciante, comer umas almôndegas ou wraps de salmão e só depois descer à secção de vendas para finalmente efetuar as suas compras. Em suma, uma pessoa que quisesse comprar três parafusos e duas cavilhas saía quatro horas depois com uma cozinha equipada e uma boa indigestão. Os suecos, pessoas muito previdentes, tinham inclusive desenhado uma linha amarela no chão para indicar o caminho a seguir, não fosse dar-se o caso de um visitante ter a má ideia de se desviar do rumo certo.

I only meant, you know, you shouldn’t be wasting your time on imbeciles. I know how hard it is to find the right person, but that’s no reason to exhaustively work your way through all the wrong people. You seem to be living your romantic life by some kind of process of elimination. It’s like matching a Louis Quatorze armchair with one of those plastic patio tables. It simply doesn’t work.” “Oh, I see,” Bel said. “I’m an armchair, is that it?” “A Louis Quatorze armchair,” I qualified. “And my boyfriends are patio tables.” “Actually,” I remembered, “this one’s more like one of those self-assembly Swedish wardrobes.

The importance of Jung’s discovery bears considering. Since the seventeenth century, we’ve been taught that what is “in our heads” is only “subjective,” that we are all island universes, separate worlds, and that everything in those worlds has been furnished with material taken from outside, from the senses, as if our minds began as empty rooms, waiting for the mental equivalent of a trip to Ikea. Yet anyone, like myself, who has had precognitive dreams or experienced synchronicities or telepathy or other “paranormal” phenomena knows this isn’t quite true. Jung knew this and is saying that there are things in our heads that have nothing to do with us or our senses. In his book Heaven and Hell Aldous Huxley made the same point. “Like the earth of a hundred years ago,” Huxley wrote, “our mind still has its darkest Africas, its unmapped Borneos and Amazonian basins.” And while the creatures that inhabit these “far continents” of the mind seem “improbable,” they are nevertheless “facts of observation,” which argues for their “complete autonomy” and “self-sufficiency.”18 Huxley borrowed the title of his book from another extraordinary inner explorer, the Swedish sage Emanuel Swedenborg, who was a powerful influence on Jung, and who, like Jung, was a practiced hypnagogist and developed a method of entering similar inner worlds.

When you've been together for a 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. Once, when they were at Ikea, very recently, Roger had suggested when they were having lunch in the cafeteria that they each have a piece of cake because he understood that it was an important day for Anna-Lena, and because it was important to her, it was important to him as well. Because that's how he loves her. She went on rubbing the cushion cover that was nicer in the floral pattern and glanced over at the two women in a way Anna-Lena thought was discreet. The pregnant one and her wife; Roger was looking at them as well. He was holding the realtor's prospective with the layout of the apartment in his hand and grunted, "For God's sake, darling, look at this. Why do they have to call the small room 'child's room'? It could just as well be a perfectly ordinary damn bedroom." Roger didn't like it when there were pregnant women at apartment viewings because couples expecting a baby always bid too much. He didn't like children's rooms, either. That's why Anna-Lena always asks Roger as many questions as she can think of when they walk through the children's section in Ikea: to help distract him from the incomprehensible grief. Because that's how she loves him.

I panted as he pulled me back through the entryway, hands on my waist, kissing the whole way, and collapsed backward onto the gray leather couch, which felt softer than my skin. I fell on top of him, straddling his lap. He kissed his way down my neck and across the collar of my blouse, leaving a trail of fire behind. "Enough of that," I panted, ripping my shirt over my head. Thank goodness I'd worn a decent bra today---blue satin with a bow in the middle, not frayed or torn anywhere. He eyed it with a growl of approval, but maybe it wasn't a growl for the bra at all, because a moment of fumbling over my back and---pop---I shook off my now unfastened bra. "And to think you didn't like me at first." He drank me in unabashedly, his eyes roaming from belly to breasts to nose to eyes, and each inch his eyes traveled made me feel more and more powerful. Like I could go anywhere, do anything. Except all I wanted to do was right here. I ground against him, feeling his cock already hard and strong under his zipper. "Who says I like you now?" He gasped and pulled me tighter onto him. "If this is what you do to people you don't like, what do you do to people you do like?" I silenced him with another kiss as I rubbed up and down him again. Now my own sex was throbbing, and I sucked in a breath with every movement. I kept moving up and down as he kissed my breasts, tongue tracing lightly over each nipple. When I couldn't take it anymore, I tumbled to the side, lying down on the couch and pulling him on top of me. Because his was an expensive couch and not the cheap one my old roommate had bought at Ikea, there was plenty of room for us to writhe without making me feel like I might topple off the edge. He went down to kiss my breasts again... and kept going. His tongue slid down my stomach, did a lazy circle around my belly button. I clenched my teeth, holding back a beg for more as he slowly, slowly, way too slowly unzipped my skirt and tugged it down. I kicked it off, along with my underwear, when he reached my knees, nearly clipping him on the ear. When I felt close to the edge, I reached down and pulled him up. My hand moved down and took over, zeroing in on just the right spot on my clit. It didn't take long. I shuddered against his shoulder, biting back a cry, then wondered why I was biting it back and let it out. Breathing hard, my head collapsed back into the cushion. I was a little worried that now post-orgasm clarity would descend upon me and be like, What the hell are you doing, Julie? but the post-orgasm clarity seemed to approve. With a wink and a nudge, it made me pull away, and the desire roared back inside me. "That's why it's great to have a clitoris," I told Bennett. "Multiple orgasms.

Japan is obsessed with French pastry. Yes, I know everyone who has access to French pastry is obsessed with it, but in Tokyo they've taken it another level. When a patissier becomes sufficiently famous in Paris, they open a shop in Tokyo; the department store food halls feature Pierre Herme, Henri Charpentier, and Sadaharu Aoki, who was born in Tokyo but became famous for his Japanese-influenced pastries in Paris before opening shops in his hometown. And don't forget the famous Mister Donut, which I just made up. Our favorite French pastry shop is run by a Japanese chef, Terai Norihiko, who studied in France and Belgium and opened a small shop called Aigre-Douce, in the Mejiro neighborhood. Aigre-Douce is a pastry museum, the kind of place where everything looks too beautiful to eat. On her first couple of visits, Iris chose a gooey caramel brownie concoction, but she and Laurie soon sparred over the affections of Wallace, a round two-layer cake with lime cream atop chocolate, separated by a paper-thin square chocolate wafer. "Wallace is a one-woman man," said Laurie. Iris giggled in the way eight-year-olds do at anything that smacks of romance. We never figured out why they named a cake Wallace. I blame IKEA. I've always been more interested in chocolate than fruit desserts, but for some reason, perhaps because it was summer and the fruit desserts looked so good and I was not quite myself the whole month, I gravitated toward the blackberry and raspberry items, like a cup of raspberry puree with chantilly cream and a layer of sponge cake.

Can you please also give me instructions for dancing?” “Excuse me?” “I need instructions for dancing. Like how do I move my body to music in front of other people? Break it down. Step by step.” “Seriously? Dancing isn’t one of those things that come with instructions. It’s not like putting together Ikea furniture.” “Please help me.” “Well, first of all, this is not the sort of music that will be playing.” She motions to the pianist, who is bald and bearded, which I’ve always found to be a bizarre combination. You would think you would want cranial and mandibular hair consistency. “No Ravel’s Bolero. Got it.” “No classical music, period. They’ll probably just play all the crap that’s on the radio.” “I amend my original request. I need instructions for dancing to noise.” “You just move your body to the beat. Feel the music.” Miney puts her arms up and sways to sounds I do not hear. She closes her eyes, leans on the tips of her toes, and jumps. After approximately ninety seconds, she stops and looks at me. “Your turn.” “I don’t think so.” Miney doesn’t respond. She just waits. “Fine.” I copy her, jump up and down, though I don’t actually jump down, which is a misnomer. I let gravity do its job. My sneakers make discordant squeaks along the marble floor. “No. Stop. You look like you’re having a seizure. Think of dancing like having a conversation but with the music instead of with another person. It’s all intuition and instinct.” “Right. Because I’m good at all three of those things. Intuition, instinct, and having conversations with other people.” “Little D, sarcasm becomes you. 

M-am gândit: data viitoare când mă îndrăgostesc, iau și numărul fetei de alături (nu se știe niciodată: poate că sunt predestinat să nu întâlnesc decât femei care stau fix lângă femeia vieții mele).” “Și pe timpul nopții o să ne punem protezele dentare amândoi în același pahar. Dinții noștri vor fi fericiți împreună.” “Noi nu suntem fericiți când suntem împreună. Și e și mai rău când suntem departe unul de altul. Nu mai pot. Trebuie să găsești o soluție.” “Nu mai puteam suporta să fiu asociat cu iepurele. Puțin îmi păsa mie de iepuri. îmi plăceau multe lucruri în viață.” “Astăzi oamenii se despart pentru fleacuri. Până ce moartea vă va despărți, se zice! în ziua de azi, moartea este fie și cel mai mic defect al celuilalt...” “Am mers la Ikea, și ne-am și certat la Ikea. în acest magazin mare, ar trebui să angajeze un consilier conjugal. Fiindcă, dacă există un loc în care inima cuplurilor se dezvăluie, acela este Ikea. Mă întreb chiar dacă nu cumva toată acea mobilă de asamblat nu este decât un pretext pentru a semăna zâzania sentimentală. Sunt aproape sigur că fondatorul magazinului Ikea trebuie să fi fost un suedez depresiv (e aproape un pleonasm), fără viață afectivă, care a găsit mijlocul de a o distruge și pe a altora. Toți studenții la sociologie ar trebui să meargă să facă un stagiu acolo, ar găsi de toate.” “— Uitați-vă la mobila asta. Fritz a montat-o! M-au privit dintr-odată cu o admirație excesivă. Aveam impresia că sunt Gustave Eiffel.” “— Stingem lumina peste tot. îi facem pe părinții mei să creadă că ăsta e un obicei al blocului. Și zicem că în Polonia chiar există obiceiul să faci pe mortul în pauza dintre două feluri de mâncare.” “Voiam să fiu acceptat undeva, să am obiceiuri, să petrec duminici insuportabile poate, dar duminici sigure.” “Nu mă deranjează că vă certați în timpul lecției mele, dar cel mai bine ar fi să faceți asta în germană. Alice a ezitat o clipă (chipul ei era precum al cuiva care așteaptă pe un peron), apoi s-a apucat să mă insulte în germană. Toate astea nu prea aveau nimic în comun cu Goethe. În oricare altă împrejurare, aș fi apreciat cu siguranță această agitație germanică, dar în acel moment mă simțeam depășit. M-am așezat pe canapea și am ascultat-o pe femeia aceea cum mă înjură într-o limbă pe care nu o înțelegeam. Lângă ea, un tânăr lua notițe. Ca să reacționez cumva, m-am gândit în ce limbă aș fi putut da replica. Știam destule cuvinte în limbi străine, însă atât. M-am gândit să contraatac într-un amestec de daneză și croată, dar până la urmă am optat pentru un pic de polonă. Totuși, singura frază care-mi venea în minte era: „Știți cumva unde se află hotelul?" Mă îndoiam că această glumă poloneză ar fi putut să echilibreze forțele. Eram invadat și nu aveam altă opțiune decât să capitulez. întotdeauna se-ntâmpla la fel. Această scenă a avut măcar meritul de a ne fi destins. Poate că ar trebui să ne certăm mereu într-o limbă străină. Benoît ne privea atent; cu siguranță îi ofeream o imagine jalnică a cuplului.

So,” I cleared my throat, unable to tolerate his moans of pleasure and praise any longer, “uh, what are your plans for the weekend?” “The weekend?” He sounded a bit dazed. “Yes. This weekend. What do you have planned? Planning on busting up any parties?” I asked lightly, not wanting him to know that I was unaccountably breathless. I moved to his other knee and discarded the towel. “Ha. No. Not unless those wankers down the hall give me a reason to.” Removing his arms from his face, Bryan’s voice was thick, gravelly as he responded, “I, uh, have some furniture to assemble.” “Really?” Surprised, I stilled and stared at the line of his jaw. The creases around his mouth—when he held perfectly still—made him look mature and distinguished. Actually, they made him even more classically handsome, if that was even possible. “Yes. Really. Two IKEA bookshelves.” I slid my hands lower, behind his ankle, waiting for him to continue. When he didn’t, I prompted, “That’s it?” “No.” He sighed, hesitated, then added, “I need to stop by the hardware store. The tap in my bathroom is leaking and one of the drawer handles in the kitchen is missing a screw. I just repainted the guest room, so I have to take the excess paint cans to the chemical disposal place; it’s only open on Saturdays before noon. And then I promised my mam I’d take her to dinner.” My mouth parted slightly because the oddest thing happened as he rattled off his list of chores. It turned me on. Even more so than running my palms over his luscious legs. That’s right. His list of adult tasks made my heart flutter. I rolled my lips between my teeth, not wanting to blurt that I also needed to go to the hardware store over the weekend. As a treat to myself, I was planning to organize Patrick’s closet and wanted to install shelves above the clothes rack. Truly, Sean’s penchant for buying my son designer suits and ties was completely out of hand. Without some reorganization, I would run out of space. That’s right. Organizing closets was something I loved to do. I couldn’t get enough of those home and garden shows, especially Tiny Houses, because I adored clever uses for small spaces. I was just freaky enough to admit my passion for storage and organization. But back to Bryan and his moans of pleasure, adult chores, and luscious legs. I would not think about Bryan Leech adulting. I would not think about him walking into the hardware store in his sensible shoes and plain gray T-shirt—that would of course pull tightly over his impressive pectoral muscles—and then peruse the aisles for . . . a screw. I. Would. Not. Ignoring the spark of kinship, I set to work on his knee, again counting to distract myself. It worked until he volunteered, “I’d like to install some shelves in my closet, but that’ll have to wait until next weekend. Honestly, I’ve been putting it off. I’d do just about anything to get someone to help me organize my closet.” He chuckled. I’d like to organize your closet. I fought a groan, biting my lip as I removed my hands, turned from his body, and rinsed them under the faucet. “We’re, uh, finished for today.

Craftsmanship cements a relationship of trust between buyer and seller, worker and employer, and expects something of both. It is about caring about the work and its application. It is what distinguishes the work of humans from the work of machines, and it is everything that IKEA and other discounters are not.

MIT-trained urban development expert Wig Zamore said: “IKEA is the least sustainable retailer on the planet.

Great, we’d stumbled into the Overworld version of Ikea.

IKEA’s adroit coordination of policies is a more integrated design than anyone else’s in the furniture business. Traditional furniture retailers do not carry large inventory, traditional manufacturers do not have their own stores, normal retailers do not specify their own designs or use catalogs rather than salespeople, and so on. Because IKEA’s many policies are different from the norm and because they fit together in a coherent design, IKEA’s system has a chain-link logic. That means that adopting only one of these policies does no good—it adds expense to the competitor’s business without providing any real competition to IKEA. Minor adjustments just won’t do—to compete effectively with IKEA, an existing rival would have to virtually start fresh and, in effect, compete with its own existing business. No one did. Today, more than fifty years after IKEA pioneered its new strategy in the furniture industry, no one has really replicated it.

Like the circles of Dante’s Inferno, IKEA descends through several floors towards Hell itself (or the checkout, as people with no imagination insist on calling it). Unfortunately for the unwary traveller, you must venture through every floor no matter what item you wish to procure, whether you want to or not. For example, should you wish, like me, merely to purchase a wok and a couple of bookends to stop Greg’s huge hardback rugby books from falling over all the time, you must also look at every other sodding product IKEA has on sale. You must make your way along the circuitous and tortuous route that the sadistic Swedes have laid out between you and the exit. No one in human history has ever said the following: ‘I’ve just popped into IKEA and picked up some meatballs. You fancy a spag bol?’ One does not simply ‘pop’ into IKEA. One plans the visit like a military operation. Make no mistake: shopping there is not to be taken lightly. Not if you wish to retain both sanity and a healthy bank balance.