Katie Bastian

“She isn't traumatized, she isn't weighed down by any obvious grief. She's just sad, all the time. An evil little creature that wouldn't have shown up on any X-rays was living in her chest, rushing through her blood and filling her head with whispers, saying she wasn't good enough, that she was weak and ugly and would never be anything but broken. 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. In the end you get exhausted from always tensing the skin around your ribs, never letting your shoulders sink, brushing along walls all your life with white knuckles, always afraid that someone will notice you, because no one's supposed to do that.

All Nadia knew was that she had never felt like someone who had anything in common with anyone else. She had always been entirely alone in every emotion. She sat in a classroom full of her contemporaries, looking like everything was the same as usual, but inside she was standing in a forest screaming until her heart burst. The trees grew until one day the sunlight could no longer break through the foliage, and the darkness in here became impenetrable.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“But when you get home this evening, when this day is over and the night takes us, allow yourself a deep breath. Because we made it through this day as well.

There'll be another one along tomorrow.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“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.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“People want to be good. Deep down. Kind. The problem of course is that it isn't always possible to be kind to idiots, because they're idiots.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People