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Anxious People

Book by Fredrik Backman · 50 quotes · Marriage, Love, Anxiety

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Anxious People Quotes

“Încercăm să fim maturi și să ne iubim unul pe altul și să înțelegem cum naiba se conectează cablurile USB, Căutăm ceva de care să ne ținem, ceva pentru care să luptăm și ceva la care să visăm. [...] Avem în comun aceste lucruri, deși majoritatea rămânem străini unul pentru celălalt. Nu știm ce ne facem unul altuia, cum ne influențăm viețile. Astăzi am trecut, poate, grăbiți unul pe lângă celălalt și niciunul n-a observat. [...] Apoi ne-am îndepărtat. Nu știu cine ești. Dar, când ajungi seara acasă, când ziua s-a încheiat și noaptea ne ia în stăpânire, trage adânc aer în piept! Căci am făcut față încă unei zile. Iar mâine vine alta.”

PeopleLifeThoughtsStrangers
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“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.”

LonelinessDepressionAnxietyMental Illness
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“He still has the same nightmares, ten years on. After Police College, exams, shift after shift, late nights, all his work at the station that's garnered so much praise from everyone but his dad, even more late nights, so much work that he's come to hate not working, unsteady walks home at dawn to the piles of bills in the hall and an empty bed, sleeping pills, alcohol. On nights when everything has been completely unbearable he's gone out running, mile after mile through darkness and cold and silence, his feet drumming against the pavement faster and faster, but never with the intention of getting anywhere, of accomplishing anything. Some men run like hunters, but he ran like their prey. Drained with exhaustion he would finally stagger home, then head off to work and start all over again. Sometimes a few whiskies were enough to get him to sleep, and on good mornings ice-cold showers were enough to wake him up, and in between he did whatever he could to take the edge off the hypersensitivity of his skin, stifle the tears when he felt them in his chest, long before they reached his throat and eyes. But all the while: still those same nightmares.”

GriefAnxietyNightmares
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“Of course that was just one of her many strange little habits and quirks: she put onion flakes on breakfast cereal and poured bearnaise sauce on popcorn, and if you yawned when she was next to you, she would lean forward and stick a finger in your mouth, just to see if she could pull it out again before you closed your mouth. Sometimes she put cornflakes in Jim's shoes, sometimes little bits of boiled egg and anchovies in Jack's pockets, and the looks on their face when they realized seemed to amuse her more and more each time she did it. That's the kind of thing you miss. That she used to do this, that she used to do that. She *was,* she *is.*”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“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. That you have to have opinions all the time, you have to decide which party to vote for and what wallpaper you like and what your sexual preferences are and which flavour yoghurt best reflects your personality. You have to make choices and be chosen by others, every second, the whole time.”

ChildhoodAdultingAdult Life
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“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.”

AgeFeeling Old
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“Sanningen är förstås att om människor verkligen var så lyckliga som de ser ut att vara på internet skulle de inte vara så förbannat mycket på internet, för ingen människa som har en riktig bra dag ägnar hälften av den åt fotografera sig själv. Alla kan odla myten om sig själva om de har tillräckligt mycket gödsel, så om gräset verkar grönare på andra sidan staketet beror det förmodligen på att det är fullt av skit. Men det spelar ingen roll, för nu har vi lärt oss att kräva att varje dag måste vara speciell. Varje dag.”

BackmanFolk Med åNgest
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“Jim föddes i en generation som såg datorer som magi, Jack är från en som alltid tagit dem för givet. När Jim var liten bestraffade man barn genom att tvinga dem att gå till sina rum, nuförtiden tvingar man barn att komma ut ur dem. En generation fick skäll för att inte kunde sitta still och nästa får skäll för att de aldrig rör sig. Så när Jim skriver en rapport trycker han beslutsamt varje tangent ända ner i botten, kontrollerar genast skärmen för att försäkra sig om att den inte lurat honom, och först därefter trycker han på nästa tangent. För Jim lurar man minsann inte. Jack skriver givetvis i gengäld så som unga män som aldrig levt i en värld utan internet gör, kan göra det med ögonbindel, snuddar tangenterna så lätt att ett forensiskt förbannat laboratorium inte skulle kunna bevisa att han rört dem. De både männen driver varandra till vansinne, förstås, med de allra minsta saker. När sonen söker efter något på internet säger han att han "googlar", när pappan ska göra samma sak säger han: "Det ska jag slå upp på Google." När de är oense om något säger pappan "jo men det är så för det har jag läst på Google!" och sonen gapar: "Man läser inte saker på Google pappa, man söker efter..." Det är så att säga inte det faktum att pappan inte begriper hur man ska använda teknik som sonen blir galen på, utan att pappan nästan förstår. Jim vet till exempel fortfarande inte hur man tar en skärmdump, så när han vill ta en bild av något på sin datorskärm fotograferar han datorskärmen med sin mobiltelefon. När han vill ta en bild av något på sin mobiltelefon lägger han den i kopiatormaskinen. Det senaste riktigt stora bråket Jim och Jack hade var när någon chefs chef kom på att stadens poliskår skulle bli "mer tillgänglig på sociala medier" (för i Stockholm är poliserna tydligen så in i helsike tillgängliga hela tiden) och bad dem ta bilder av varandra under en vanlig arbetsdag. Så Jim fotograferade Jack i polisbilen. Medan jack körde. Med blixt.”

BackmanFolk Med åNgest
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“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.”

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“Sometimes I think that when you live together for a very long time, and have children together, life is a bit like climbing trees. Up and down, up and down, you try to cope with everything, be good, you climb and climb and climb, and you hardly ever see each other along the way. You don't notice that when you're young, but everything changes when you have children, and sometimes it feels like you hardly ever see the person you mar-ried anymore. You're parents and teammates, first and foremost, well, and being married slips down the list of priorities. But you you keep climbing trees, and see each other along the way. I always thought that was just the way it is, life, the way it has to be. We just had to get through everything, I thought. And I kept telling myself that the important thing was that we kept climbing the same tree. Because then I thought that sooner or later. and this sounds so pretentious... but I thought that sooner or later we'd end up on the same branch. And then we could sit there holding hands and look-ing at the view. That's what I thought we'd be doing when we got old. But time goes quicker than you think.”

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