Before you jump into reading all the brilliant quotes from Anxious People by Fredrik Backman, let me tell you how much I enjoyed marking my favorite quotes while reading. The book is the funniest and most interesting detective story I’ve ever read. As you can see, these quotes from Anxious People highlight the challenges of being human, from anxiety and marriage to the importance of humor and connection. They’re my favorite because they capture how people protect and support each other, find meaning in life’s uncertainties, and remind us that we’re all vulnerable but hopeful.
Top 10 Quotes from Anxious People
“God doesn’t protect people from knives, sweetheart. That’s why God gave us other people, so we can protect each other.”
“Because no matter how much money anyone earns, they still lie awake at the end of the month worrying about money.I heard a man who worked in a casino say that no one gets ruined by losing, they get ruined by trying to win back the money they lost.”
“You end up marrying the one you don’t understand. Then you spend the rest of your life trying.”
“Bridges exist to bring people closer together.”
“You can’t live long with the ones who are only beautiful, Jules. But the funny ones, oh, they last a lifetime!”
“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.”
“Sometimes two strangers only need one thing in common to make each other sympathetic.”
“Late in life even computer programmers become poets.”
“People need bureaucracy, to give them time to think before they do something stupid.”
“Sometimes we don’t need distance, just barriers.”
More Quotes from Anxious People
“It’s an ache in our soul, invisible lead weights in our blood, an indescribable pressure in our chest.”
“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. Especially if you have other people you’re trying to be a reasonably good human being for.”
“And we really don’t know more about children than tropical fish, so the responsibility frightens the life out of us each morning. We don’t have a plan, we just do our best to get through the day, because there’ll be another one coming along tomorrow.”
“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.”
“Some people want to decide for themselves how happy they are.”
“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.”
“She said you can’t protect your kids from life, because life gets us all in the end.”
“Sometimes it’s easier to live with your own anxieties if you know that no one else is happy, either.”
“Because how happy can anyone really be, all the time? How could there be time for that? Mostly we’re just trying to get through the day. You’ve probably had days like that as well. But when you get through enough of them, one morning you look over your shoulder and realize that you’re on your own, the person you were married to turned to somewhere along the way.”
“Obviously that’s neither logical nor plausible, but if phobias were logical and plausible they wouldn’t be called phobias.”
“If you’re constantly presented with alternatives, you can never make up your mind.”
“Listen, the problem with the middle class is that you think someone can be too rich to buy things. But that’s not true. You can only be too poor.”
“I’d say that a panic attack is when psychological pain becomes so strong that it manifests itself physically. The anxiety becomes so acute that the brain can’t… Well, in the absence of any better words, I’d say that the brain doesn’t have sufficient bandwidth to process all the information. The firewall collapses, so to speak. And anxiety overwhelms us.”
“I didn’t say that money was happiness. I said happiness is like money. A made-up value that represents something we can’t weigh or measure.”
“But we can measure and evaluate the cost of depression. And we know that it’s very common for people suffering from depression to be afraid of feeling happy. Because even depression can be a sort of secure bubble, it can make you start to think, If I’m not unhappy, if I’m not angry—who am I then?”
“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?”
“If the prospective buyers couldn’t agree about anything else, they could at least agree on that, because nothing unites a group of strangers more effectively than the opportunity to come together and sigh at a hopeless case.”
“When you’ve been together for a very long time, it’s the little things that matter. In a long marriage you don’t need words to have a row, but you don’t need words to say “I love you,” either.”
“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 flavor yogurt best reflects your personality.”
“Addicts are addicted to their drugs, and their families are addicted to hope.”
“His mom kissed the top of his head and said: “How do you eat an elephant, sweetheart?” He replied the way a child who’s heard the same joke a thousand times does: “One bit at a time, Mom.”
“I believe the one that says that if you fall for long enough, it can become impossible to tell the difference between flying and falling.”
Did you like the quotes? Which one so far could be your favorite Anxious People quote? Do not forget to share it with your friends.
The quotes from Anxious People remind us that, despite the chaos and anxiety we often experience, we find strength in each other. Whether it’s through laughter, love, or simply understanding that “sometimes we don’t need distance, just barriers,” these quotes offer a comforting reminder that we’re all navigating life together, one step at a time.
