Alex

“The truth of course is that if people really were as happy as they look on the Internet, they wouldn’t spend so much damn time on the Internet, because no one who’s having a really good day spends half of it taking pictures of themselves. 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.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“No one is born evil. As Winnicott put it, “A baby cannot hate the mother, without the mother first hating the baby.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Silent Patient

“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?”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People