"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."

"I said happiness is like money. A made-up value that represents something we can’t weigh or measure."

"If I’m being honest, I think that almost all of us have a need to tell ourselves that we’re helping to make the world better. Or at least that we’re not making it worse. That we’re on the right side. That even if… I don’t know… that maybe even our very worst actions serve some sort of higher purpose. Because practically everyone distinguishes between good and bad, so if we breach our own moral code, we have to come up with an excuse for ourselves. I think that’s known as neutralizing techniques in criminology. It could be religious or political conviction, or the belief that we had no choice, but we need something to justify our bad deeds. Because I honestly believe that there are very few people who could live with knowing that they are… bad."

"nothing unites a group of strangers more effectively than the opportunity to come together and sigh at a hopeless case"

"If you had to try things out and read things and find out the truth about things, then you’d never have time to have an opinion about anything."

"if you do it for long enough, it can become impossible to tell the difference between flying and falling."

"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."

"if there’s one thing modern life and the Internet have taught us, it’s that you should never expect to win a discussion simply because you’re right."

"took such a deep breath that she doubled in size, then she became smaller than ever."

"The new year arrives, which of course never means as much as you hope unless you happen to sell calendars. One day becomes another, now becomes then."

- Fredrik Backman, Anxious People