Anxious People: The No. 1 New York Times bestseller, now a Netflix TV Series

They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of

We open our eyes in the morning and life is just waiting to tip a fresh avalanche of ‘Don’t Forget!’s and ‘Remember!’s over us.

Then she thought about an American author who had written that loneliness is like starvation, you don’t realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.

All winter had to do was roll in with a bit of freezing weather and take all the credit, like a man who’s spent twenty minutes next to a barbecue but has never served a full meal in his life.

She hoped they were, because sometimes it’s easier to live with your own anxieties if you know that no one else is happy,

‘Boats that stay in the harbour are safe, sweetheart, but that’s not what boats were built for.’

‘When you’re drowning you can’t call for help, you can’t wave your arms, you just sink. Your family can be standing on the beach waving cheerfully to you, completely unaware that you’re dying.’

Over time she realized that deep down almost everyone asks themselves the same sort of questions: Am I good? Do I make anyone proud? Am I useful to society? Am I good at my job? Generous and considerate? A decent shag? Does anyone want me to be their friend? Have I been a good parent? Am I a good person? People

He wasn’t at all difficult to replace, so he went home and the business carried on existing.