Fredrick Backman - Anxious People

This is my weird interpretation of a quote collection, while I'm reading a book. Might contain spoilers guys. So careful with it, if you want to read the book.

"This story is about a lot of things, but mostly about idiots. 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 a human is."

"(It should be noted that when she died, the bank robbers mum consisted of so much gin and tonic that they didn't dare cremate her because of the risk of explosion, but that doesn't mean she didn't have good advice to offer.)"

"It should be noted that this particular bank robber had the same level of fitness as the average thirty-nine-year-old. Not one one of those big-city thirty-nine-year-olds who deal with their midlife crisis by buying a ridiculously expensive cycling shorts and swimming caps because they have a black hole in their soul that devours Instagram pictures, more the sort of thirty-nine-year-old whose daily consumption of cheese and carbohydrates was more likely to be classified medically as a cry for help rather than a diet.

"This story isn't about that man, so you don't really need to think about him right now. Well, obviously you can't help thinking about him, it's like saying 'Don't think about biscuits,' and now you're thinking about biscuits.
Don't think about biscuits!
All you need to know is that a man was standing on a bridge ten years ago. [...] Don't think about that any more now.
Think about something nicer.
Think about biscuits."

"The estate agent looks like she'd be rather somewhere else, and, after the past fifteen minutes of conversation, the policeman looks like he wishes the estate agent were somewhere else too."

" 'I said, just answer the damn question!' the policeman repeats, with an expression common in grown man who were dissapointed by life at some point in their childhood and have never quite managed to stop feeling that way."

"... the estate agent insists, drumming her fingers on the tabletop in a way that makes the policeman feel like throwing objects with sharp corners at her."

"... the estate agent says, but manages to stop herself adding 'from the HOUSE TRICKS Estate Agency! HOW'S TRICKS?' seeing as the policeman already looks like he wishes the ammunition in his pistol wasn't so easy to trace."

"His mum always said that policemen are just boys who never bothered to find a new dream. All boys get asked 'What do you want to be when you grow up?' and at some point almost all of them answer 'A policeman!' but most of them grow out of that and come up with something better. For a moment he finds himself wishing he'd done that, too, because then his day might have been less complicated,"

"You would simply have done whatever it took to stop the man from jumping. You don't even know him, but it's an innate instinct, the idea that we can't just let strangers kill themselves."

"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, a lot of us know that the difference between us and that man on the bridge is smaller than we might wish."

"So you would have tried to save him. Because it's possible to end your life by mistake, but you have to choose to jump. You have to climb on top of somewhere high and take a step forwards.
You're a decent person. You wouldn't have just watched"

"Then the special negotiator (who had been dis-patched from Stockholm by the boss's boss, seeing as people in Stockholm seem to think they're the only ones capable of talking on the phone) called the bank robber in the hope that a peaceful resolution could be reached."

"Their relationship is complicated, as is often the case between police officers of different generations. 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."

"I've even bought some of that soy milk, not that I want to know what the heck they milked to get hold of it!' "

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

"The estate agent looks at him, and thinks he looks like a person who's had his sense of humour amputated. Not that there's any-thing wrong with that."

" 'Sit!' he says, in that tone you only use with children, dogs and estate agents."

"...which prompts the younger officer to take a short break so he can go out into the corridor and bang his head against the wall."

"This business with words is tricky when you're older and all you want to say to someone younger is: 'I can see you're in pain, and that causes me pain.' "

" 'There are days when I can't help thinking you never really came back from that bridge, love. That you're still trying to save that man on the railing, even though it's as impossible now as it was back then.' "

"...so much work that he's come to hate not working, unsteady walks home at dawn to the piles of bills in the hall and an empty bed, sleeping pills, alcohol. On nights when everything has been completely unbearable he's gone out running, mile after mile through darkness and cold and silence, [...]. Some men run like hunters, but he ran like their prey."

" '[...] I'm one of those penguins that squats on top of a stone because I don't want to accept that the egg has gone. She said you can't protect your kids from life, because life gets us all in the end.' "

"It's hard to tell exactly when a person's substance abuse begins, which is why everyone is lying when they say: 'I've got it under control.' 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."

"We lie to those we love."

"Just before the bank robber came in she had been busy refreshing her browser to find out if two famous actors were going to get divorced or not. She hoped they were, because sometimes it's easier to live with your own anxieties if you know that no one else is happy, either."

"I'll interpret that as suggesting that it's perfectly okay to have a binary attitude to intelligence."

"Because 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."

"We look around occasionally, at our place of work or at parents' meetings or out in the street, and realize with horror that everyone else seems to know exactly what they're doing. We're the only ones who have to pretend."

"..it pretty much means 'life can go all sorts of ways but it will go probably wrong'. "

"The child looked into the mother's eyes, they were shiny with alcohol and tears, intoxication and self-loathing."

"The bank robber often thinks about that to this day. Not about how terrible it was, but about how odd it is that you can't hate your mum."

"And God laughed."