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Anxious People: A Novel

Fredrik Backman

Last accessed on Monday December 6, 2021

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Not one of those big-city thirty-nine-year-olds who deal with their midlife crisis by buying ridiculously expensive cycling shorts and swimming caps because they have a black hole in their soul that devours Instagram pictures,

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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.

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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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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.

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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.

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That’s why they make such good bullies, the quick-witted little monsters. They have access to everything that’s most vulnerable in us.

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

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People like you really do seem to get upset an awful lot, and do you know why?” “No.” “Because you’re wrong. If you stopped being wrong the whole time you wouldn’t be so upset.”

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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.

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Some people accept that they will never be free of their anxiety, they just learn to carry it.

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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.

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Anna-Lena was a woman with strong feelings, and Roger a man with strong opinions,

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That was the first time Ro had ever been anyone’s girlfriend. That was the evening she went from being hopelessly infatuated to irrevocably in love.

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“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. People who think they’re better than us. Bankers who say no when we apply for a loan, psychologists who ask questions when we only want sleeping pills, old men who steal the apartments we want to renovate, rabbits who steal our wives. Everyone who doesn’t see us, doesn’t understand us, doesn’t care about us. Everyone has Stockholmers in their life, even people from Stockholm have their own Stockholmers, only to them 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.

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

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“Your mom was right, the ones who make you laugh last a lifetime,” Estelle repeated, thinking of a British author who had written that nothing in the world is so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor. 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.

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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.

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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.

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“You don’t have to prove anything to Anna-Lena. You don’t have to prove anything to anyone anymore. You’re good enough.”

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feels so incomprehensible that she isn’t here. That his heart hasn’t gotten used to the fact that no giggling idiot is going to stick her finger in his mouth when he yawns, or pour flour in his pillowcase just as he’s about to go to bed. No one to argue with him. Love him.

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“What are you going to do from now on?” “I don’t know.” The psychologist finally has something important to say. Something she didn’t learn at college but knows that everyone needs to hear, every so often. “Not knowing is a good place to start.”

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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.

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