Welcome to the book-verse! Today, I’m diving into the book of “Anxious People” authored by the Fredrik Backman. As a book enthusiast with a penchant for blending insights with everyday lives, I can’t wait to share the lessons that I’ve unearthed through this book.
In Fredrik Backman’s “Anxious People,” readers are pulled into a world where the complexities of human nature take center stage. With his signature blend of heartwarming storytelling and piercing wit, he crafts a story that weaves together diverse characters that are as unpredictable as life itself. What initially seems like a straightforward bank robbery and hostage situation, turns into the gradual exploring of the intricacies of fear, love, and redemption.
Backman’s observations are so keen when it comes to human nature and his tone is empathetic throughout; this makes “Anxious People” one of the best proses that explore human condition and capture both the weirdness and joy of shared experiences.
So, grab your favorite reading nook, a cozy blanket, and let’s start this journey together as we uncover the most stirring and inspirational quotes from this literary masterpiece.
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.
– Anxious People
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.
– Anxious People
He sometimes thinks it’s impossible to know if children end up completely different (from their parents) despite the fact that they grew up together, or precisely because of that.
– Anxious People
It’s hardly surprising that people get confused and society is going to the dogs when it’s full of caffeine-free coffee, gluten-free bread, alcohol-free beer.
– Anxious People
Because the terrible thing about becoming an adult is being forced to realize that absolutely nobody cares about us, we have to deal with everything ourselves now, find out how the whole world works. Work and pay bills, use dental floss and get to meetings on time, stand in line and fill out forms, come to grips with cables and put furniture together, change tyres 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 pre-tend. 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.
– Anxious People
But we weren’t ready to become adults. Someone should have stopped us.
The journalists were already there, of course. Or maybe they were just locals and curious onlookers, it can be hard to tell these days when everyone films, photographs and documents their whole life as if every individual were their own television channel.
– Anxious People
Are you seriously googling “what should you do in a hostage situation?”
– Anxious People
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?
– Anxious People
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 them-selves. 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.
– Anxious People
Not that that really makes much difference, because now we’ve learned that every day needs to be special. Every day.
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.
– Anxious People
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.
– Anxious People
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 yogurt best reflects your personality. You have to make choices and be chosen by others, every second, the whole time.
– Anxious People
Because although you might be able to drum religion into people, you can’t teach faith.
– Anxious People
Addicts are addicted to their drugs, and their families are addicted to hope.
– Anxious People
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.’
– Anxious People
People like you and me are the problem, don’t you get that? We always defend ourselves by saying we’re only offering a service. That we’re just one tiny part of the mar-ket. That everything is people’s own fault. That they’re greedy, that they shouldn’t have given us their money. And then we have the nerve to wonder why stock markets crash and the city is full of rats.
– Anxious People
She felt like telling him that she needs distance. That she can’t stop massaging her hands. That she counts everything in every room because it calms her down. That she likes spreadsheets and turnover forecasts because she likes order.
– Anxious People
But 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.
As we wrap up this post on book quotes from this amazingly emotional book “Anxious People,” I hope you’ve found some great moments of your own that brought you to tears. Books have an uncanny ability to transform our thinking, improve our mood, and inspire us to achieve our personal goals. So, why not make reading a cherished part of your daily routine?
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