An Ode to 26 Thought-Provoking Life Quotes from Fredrik Backman’s Anxious People

I recently completed Fredrik Backman’s Anxious People. The book is about a failed bank robbery that turns into a hostage situation during an open-house apartment viewing. The story unfolds as a group of diverse characters, each with their own personal struggles and secrets, are brought together in an unexpected and tense situation.

“Anxious People” includes dollops of humor and empathy. Backman delves into the complexities of human emotions, vulnerabilities, and how human connection and shared experiences can bind even the most distinct characters. Ultimately, humanity and kindness win.

Fredrik Backman has a knack for words. His quotes in Beartown were a class apart and remain one of the most popular pages on this blog. His writing in Anxious People is no different. In no time, he captures your heart with his words to describe emotions that are generally not easy to translate into words.

Here are some of my most favorite quotes from the book:

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.’

‘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 for ever 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.’

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

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 was a time when a bank was a bank. But now there are evidently ‘cashless’ banks, banks without any money, which is surely something of a travesty? 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.

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

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!’

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.

‘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 aeroplanes 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.’

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Young people today. You’re so aware of how you affect your children. I heard a paediatrician say on television that a generation ago, parents used to come to him and say, “Our child’s wetting the bed, what’s wrong with him?” Now, a generation later, they come to him and say, “Our child’s wetting the bed, what’s wrong with us?” You take the blame for everything.

Nothing must happen to you

No, what am I saying

Everything must happen to you

And it must be wonderful

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.

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.

Not knowing is a good place to start.

***

Picture Courtesy: cottonbro studio

An Ode to 11 Thought-Provoking Life Quotes from Julian Barnes’ The Sense of An Ending

The Sense of An Ending by Julian Barnes is a slow burner. It is the first time I took to a Booker Prize winner, enjoying it thoroughly from start to finish without my interest wavering or feeling unnecessarily overwhelmed. It was not grim at all, and that took me by surprise, for I was expecting a story as gloomy as the title. I was hooked to the mystifying story arc and character sketches. Even more amusing was how the characters spoke – sometimes comical, sometimes pessimistic, sometimes a bit aggravating (as intended).

Several instances and dialogues in the book offer a different perspective on life and its various eccentricities. I have listed some of my favorite lines below.

“History is the certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”

“He was too clever. If you’re that clever, you can argue yourself into anything. You just leave common sense behind.”

“He thought logically and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense.”

“Some Englishman once said that marriage is a long, dull meal with the pudding served first.”

“History isn’t the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It’s more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated.”

“There were some women who aren’t at all mysterious but are only made so by men’s inability to understand them.”

“It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves, when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.”

“But time … how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time … give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.”

“The question of accumulation – you put money on a horse, it wins, and your winnings go one to the next horse in the next race, and so on. Your winnings accumulate. But do your losses? Not at the racetrack – there, you just lose your original stake. But in life? Perhaps here, different rules apply. You bet on a relationship, it fails; you go on to the next relationship, it fails too: and maybe what you lose is not two simple minus sums but the multiple of what you staked. That’s what it feels like, anyway. Life isn’t just addition and subtraction. There’s also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.”

“Because just as all political and historical change sooner or later disappoints, so does adulthood. So does life. Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

“I had a friend who trained as a lawyer, then became disenchanted and never practised. He told me that the one benefit of those wasted years was that he no longer feared either the law or lawyers. And something like that happens more generally, doesn’t it? The more you learn, the less you fear. ‘Learn’ not in the sense of academic study, but in the practical understanding of life.”

An Ode to 17 Thought-Provoking Life Quotes from Fredrik Backman’s Beartown

I am a big fan of Fredrik Backman, even though I have read only 2 of his books.

The first one was A Man Called Ove. I completed the second one quite recently. It is a beautiful, emotional, intense story of a sleepy little cold town called Beartown. A place where people are laidback in all things except one – ice hockey. Their love for the sport transcends everything. It reminds me of professional football club fans. The same passion, the same energy, the same love. The same disappointment when their team loses or when a controversy pops up. If you are a sports fan or know someone who is, you would find this book extremely relatable.

Fredrik Backman is a genius when it comes to explaining moments and expressing emotions. I got goosebumps while reading through many of the quotes in Beartown.

I am listing some of my favorites here.

“The only thing the sport gives us are moments. But what the hell is life, Peter, apart from moments?”

“Being a parent makes you feel like a blanket that’s always too small. No matter how hard you try to cover everyone, there’s always someone who’s freezing.”

“Religion is something between you and other people; it’s full of interpretations and theories and opinions. But faith … that’s just between you and God.”

“People sometimes say that sorrow is mental but longing is physical. One is a wound, the other an amputated limb, a withered petal compared to a snapped stem.”

“One of all the terrible effects of grief is that we interpret its absence as egotism. It’s impossible to explain what you have to do in order to carry on after a funeral, how to put the pieces of a family back together again, how to live with the jagged edges. So what do you end up asking for? You ask for a good day. One single good day. A few hours of amnesia.”

“In a few years’ time she’ll read an old newspaper article about research showing that the part of the brain that registers physical pain is the same part that registers jealousy. And then Ana will understand why she hurt so badly.”

“A great deal is expected of anyone who’s been given a lot.”

“Community is the fact that we work towards the same goal, that we accept our respective roles in order to reach it. Values is the fact that we trust each other. That we love each other.”

“If Peter has learned one thing about human nature during all his years in hockey, it’s that almost everyone regards themselves as a good team player, but that very few indeed understand what that really means.”

“When you can accept the worst aspects of your teammates because you love the collective, that’s when you’re a team player.”

“Because the thing you can never be prepared for when you have children is your increased sensitivity. Not just feeling, but hypersensitivity. He didn’t know he was capable of feeling this much, to the point where he can hardly bear to be in his own skin.”

“One of the first things you learn as a leader, whether you choose the position or have it forced upon you, is that leadership is as much about what you don’t say as what you do say.”

“The easiest way to unite a group isn’t through love, because love is hard. It makes demands. Hate is simple.”

“Every child in every town in every country has at some point played games that are dangerous to the point of being lethal. Every gang of friends includes someone who always takes things too far, who is the first to jump from the highest rock, the last to jump across the rails when the train comes. That child isn’t the bravest, just the least frightened. And possibly the one who feels he or she doesn’t have as much to lose as the others.”

“The simplest and truest thing David knows about hockey is that teams win games. It doesn’t matter how good a coach’s tactics are: if they’re to stand any chance of working, first the players need to believe in them.”

“Fighting isn’t hard. It’s the starting and stopping that are hard.”

“There are few words that are harder to explain than ‘loyalty’. It’s always regarded as a positive characteristic, because a lot of people would say that many of the best things people do for each other occur precisely because of loyalty. The only problem is that many of the very worst things we do to each other occur because of the same thing.”