Anxious People Kitap Alıntıları – Fredrik Backman

You need psyhology if you think you’re a dolphin. You need psychiatry if you’ve killed all the dolphins.

It’s possible for someone to be unfaithful to you without really thinking about you at all, but an affair requires planning.

And love can make you do quite a lot of ridiculous things. Getting married, for instance.

If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.

Life doesn’t always turn out the way you expect.

it’s easier to live with your own anxieties if you know that no one else is happy, either.

Sometimes it hurts, it really hurts, for no other reason than the fact that our skin doesn’t feel like it’s ours.

Because that was a parent’s job: to provide shoulders. Shoulders for your children to sit on when they’re little so they can see the world, then stand on when they get older so they can reach the clouds, and sometimes lean against whenever they stumble and feel unsure. They trust us, which is a crushing responsibility, because they haven’t yet realized that we don’t actually know what we’re doing. So the man did what we all do: he pretended he knew.

“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. 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.”

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. Deep down, in memories that we might prefer to suppress even from ourselves. Most adults have had a number of really bad moments, and of course not even fairly happy people manage to be happy the whole darn time.

Nothing is easier for people who never do anything themselves than to criticise someone who actually makes an effort.

“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.”

“we pass people in the street every day who feel the same as you and I, many of them just don’t know what it is.”

“loneliness is like starvation, you don’t realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.”

“We forgot how greedy we are, but above all we forgot how weak we are. And now it’s crushing us.”

“the people we argue with hardest of all are not the ones who are completely different from us, but the ones who are almost no different at all.”

“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.”

Eğer yaşanmakta olana başkaldırıyorsanız ve gençseniz, yaşadığınız her ne olursa olsun serüvendir.

If anyone asked her to sum up her view of the world, she always quoted Martin Luther: “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.

“Sometimes it’s hard to know who the biggest crooks are, people who rob banks, or the people who run the banks.”

Devletler, kontrollerine aldıkları muhalefet hareketlerini, ayaklanmaları ya da devrimleri, dışında kaldıklarından daha kolay engeller.

“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.”

“Love one another until death do us part,” isn’t that what we said? Isn’t that what we promised each other? Or am I remembering wrong? “Or at least until one of us gets bored.” Maybe that was it?”

“life can go all sorts of different ways, but it will probably go wrong.”

“Life doesn’t always turn out the way you expect.”

“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.”

You don’t fall in love with a gender, Anna-Lena. You fall in love with an idiot.

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.

and the boy tried to find the words to say how much there must be to live for, even if it maybe didn’t feel that way right now

It’s so hard to find the words when all you really want to say is: “I can see you’re hurting.”

Because that was a parent’s job: to provide shoulders. Shoulders for your children to sit on when they’re little so they can see the world, then stand on when they get older so they can reach the clouds, and sometimes lean against whenever they stumble and feel unsure.

It’s so hard to find the words when all you really want to say is: I can see you’re hurting.

Sometimes we panic, because the bills need paying and we have to be grown-up and we don’t know how, because it’s so horribly, desperately easy to fail at being grown-up.

Roger was silent for a long, long time before—without looking at her—he said three of the hardest words an older man can say to a younger woman:
“You’ll manage it.”

We plant an apple tree today, even if we know the world is going to be destroyed tomorrow.
We save those we can.

I’m happy, Zara. Not all the time, but I’ve learned that you don’t have to be happy all the time. But I’m happy… enough

It just hurts so much at times, being human. Not understanding yourself, not liking the body you’re stuck in. Seeing your eyes in the mirror and wondering whose they are, always with the same question: “What’s wrong with me? Why do I feel like this?

“democracy as a system is doomed, because idiots will believe anything as long as the story’s good enough.”

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

“life can go all sorts of different ways, but it will probably go wrong.”

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.

Sometimes it’s easier to live with your own anxieties if you know that no one else is happy, either.

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.

It’s so hard to find the words when all you really want to say is: “I can see you’re hurting.”

Expensive restaurants have bigger gaps between the tables. First class on airplanes 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.

People like you and me are the problem, don’t you get that? We always defend ourselves bu saying we’re only offering a service. That we’re just one tiny part of the market. That everything is people’s own fault. That they’re greedy, that we have the nerve to wonder why stock markets crash and the city is full of rats.

Until the bass was thudding harder than her heart. And just there, perhaps she found it. A truce with herself.

“God doesn’t protect people from knives, sweetheart. That’s why God gave us other people, so we can protect each other.”

because although you might be able to drum religion into people, you can’t teach faith .

Martin Luther: “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”

“Do you know something? On the one hand this seems like the smartest crime in the world…”
“… but on the other, it seems to have been carried out by a complete idiot.”

RO: Is this a candy?
JACK: It’s an eraser.
JULES: Stop eating everything!
RO: I was only asking!
JULES: You know she opens the fridge in every apartment we look at? Do you think that’s acceptable behavior?

You don’t fall in love with a gender, Anna-Lena. You fall in love with an idiot.

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.

My daughter says the world is already overpopulated, and she’s worried about elimate change. I don’t know why ordinary anxieties aren’t enough. Does anyone reaaly need something new to worry about?

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

“democracy as a system is doomed, because idiots will believe anything as long as the story’s good enough.”

Zara replied: “You need psychology if you think you’re a dolphin. You need psychiatry if you’ve killed all the dolphins.”

Zara asked: “And what was your relationship like before that?”
The psychologist noted that a more normal response would have been to offer condolences on her death, but tried to maintain a neutral expression and said: “We’re not here to talk about me.”
To which Zara replied: “If I’m going to leave my car with a mechanic, first I want to know if her own car is a worthless heap of junk.”

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.

“Dad…,” Jack said over his shoulder.
“Mmm,” Jim said.
“Are you seriously googling ‘what should you do in a hostage situation?”
“I might be.”

“Dad?” he eventually sighed.
“Yes, lad?”
“What does it say on Google?”

Life can go all sorts of different ways, but it will probably go wrong.”

“If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.”

She had learned to cry almost without tears now, for pracrical reasons.

It’s hard to explain to a twelve-year-old that when you were little and I walked too fast, you would run to catch up with me and take hold of my hand, and that those were the best moments of my life. Your fingertips in the palm of my hand. Before you knew how many things I’d failed at.

“If your head isn’t up to the job, your legs better be!”

If you stopped being wrong the whole time you wouldn’t be so upset.

And love can make you do quite a lot of ridiculous things. Getting married, for instance. Having children, playing happy families, and having a happy marriage. Or you might thing that, anyway. Not happy, perhaps, but plausible. A plausible marriage. Because how happy can anyone really be, all the time? How could there be a time for that? Mostly we’re jusy trying to get through the day.

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

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

Men and women going around for months having trouble breathing and seeing doctor after doctor because they think there’s something wrong with their lungs. All because it’s so damn difficult to admit that something else is… broken. That it’s an ache in our soul, invisible lead weights in our blood, an indescribable pressure in our chest. Our brains are lying to us, telling us we’re going to die. But there’s nothing wrong with our lungs, Zara. We’re not going to die, you and I.”

The truth. There isn’t any. All we’ve managed to find out about the boundaries of the universe is that it hasn’t got any, and all we know about God is that we don’t know anything.

“I believe the one that says that if you do it for long enough, it can become impossible to tell the difference between flying and falling.”

The truth? The truth about all this? The truth is that this was a story about many different things, but most of all about idiots. Because we’re doing the best we can, we really are. We’re trying to be grown-up and love each other and understand how the hell you’re supposed to insert USB leads. We’re looking for something to cling on to, something to fight for, something to look forward to.

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 are more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.

Sometimes we don’t need distance, just barriers.