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Julia
Ro is Julia’s wife and one of the people viewing the apartment for sale. Though Ro is nonwhite and was born outside of Sweden, her birthplace is never specified. A very anxious person, Ro rejects the apartment—and has rejected almost two dozen prior to this one. This causes strife between Ro and Julia, but Ro is unwilling to tell Julia the truth: she’s afraid she’s not a good enough partner, and she’s also already grieving her dad, who has dementia and can no longer talk her through making such big decisions. She’s also anxious because she and Julia are expecting a baby in the next few weeks, and she’s baffled by how serious Julia has become about parenthood and afraid that she doesn’t know enough to be a good parent. Julia, however, insists that Ro is going to be a fantastic parent, mostly because Ro has the sense of humor of a nine-year-old. This is because as a child, Ro and her family fled a warzone and had to evade snipers in helicopters—and Ro’s entire family turned to humor to process that trauma. Ultimately, Ro and Julia buy the apartment across the hallway and have a son.
Ro Quotes in Anxious People
The Anxious People quotes below are all either spoken by Ro or refer to Ro. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 38
Quotes
“Since [Julia] got pregnant everything’s become so serious, because parents are always serious and I suppose we’re trying to fit in. Sometimes I don’t think I’m ready for the responsibility—I mean, I think my phone is asking too much of me when it wants me to install an update, and I find myself yelling: ‘You’re suffocating me.’ You can’t shout that at a child. And children have to be updated all the time, because they can kill themselves just crossing the street or eating a peanut! I’ve mislaid my phone three times already today, I don’t know if I’m ready for a human being.”
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 40
Quotes
“I just wish Roger could feel important again.”
Julia didn’t seem to follow the logic.
“Grandchildren would make him feel important?”
Anna-Lena smiled weakly.
“Have you ever held a three-year-old by the hand on the way home from preschool?”
“No.”
“You’re never more important than you are then.”
Chapter 58
Quotes
“Ro’s going to be a brilliant mom. She can make any child laugh, just like my mom, because their sense of humor hasn’t developed at all since they were nine.”
“You’re going to be a brilliant mom, too,” Estelle assured her.
[…]
“I don’t know. Everything feels such a big deal, and other parents all seem so…funny the whole time. […] I don’t actually like all children. I thought that would change, but I meet my friends’ children now and I still think they’re annoying and have a lousy sense of humor.”
[…]
“You don’t have to like all children. Just one. And children don’t need the world’s best parents, just their own parents. To be perfectly honest with you, what they need most of the time is a chauffeur.”
“They fled across the mountains, in the middle of winter, and the children each had to carry a sheet, and if they heard the sound of helicopters they were supposed to lie down in the snow with the sheet over them, so they couldn’t be seen. And their parents would run in different directions, so that if the men in the helicopter started firing, they’d fire at the moving targets. And not at…and I didn’t know what to…”
[…] [Ro’s] parents had taught her during their flight through the mountains that 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.
Chapter 66
Quotes
“Sometimes I think that when you live together for a very long time, and have children together, life is a bit like climbing trees. Up and down, up and down, you try to cope with everything, be good, you climb and climb and climb, and you hardly ever see each other along the way. You don’t notice that when you’re young, but everything changes when you have children, and sometimes it feels like you hardly ever see the person you married anymore. You’re parents and teammates, first and foremost, and being married slips down the list of priorities. But you…well, you keep climbing trees, and see each other along the way.”
“This isn’t just an apartment, it’s my home, I don’t want to hand it over to someone who’s just going to be passing through, to make money from it. I want someone who’s going to love living here, like I have. Maybe that’s hard for a young person to understand.”
That wasn’t true. There wasn’t a single person in the apartment who didn’t understand perfectly.
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Ro Quotes in Anxious People
The Anxious People quotes below are all either spoken by Ro or refer to Ro. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 38
Quotes
“Since [Julia] got pregnant everything’s become so serious, because parents are always serious and I suppose we’re trying to fit in. Sometimes I don’t think I’m ready for the responsibility—I mean, I think my phone is asking too much of me when it wants me to install an update, and I find myself yelling: ‘You’re suffocating me.’ You can’t shout that at a child. And children have to be updated all the time, because they can kill themselves just crossing the street or eating a peanut! I’ve mislaid my phone three times already today, I don’t know if I’m ready for a human being.”
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 40
Quotes
“I just wish Roger could feel important again.”
Julia didn’t seem to follow the logic.
“Grandchildren would make him feel important?”
Anna-Lena smiled weakly.
“Have you ever held a three-year-old by the hand on the way home from preschool?”
“No.”
“You’re never more important than you are then.”
Chapter 58
Quotes
“Ro’s going to be a brilliant mom. She can make any child laugh, just like my mom, because their sense of humor hasn’t developed at all since they were nine.”
“You’re going to be a brilliant mom, too,” Estelle assured her.
[…]
“I don’t know. Everything feels such a big deal, and other parents all seem so…funny the whole time. […] I don’t actually like all children. I thought that would change, but I meet my friends’ children now and I still think they’re annoying and have a lousy sense of humor.”
[…]
“You don’t have to like all children. Just one. And children don’t need the world’s best parents, just their own parents. To be perfectly honest with you, what they need most of the time is a chauffeur.”
“They fled across the mountains, in the middle of winter, and the children each had to carry a sheet, and if they heard the sound of helicopters they were supposed to lie down in the snow with the sheet over them, so they couldn’t be seen. And their parents would run in different directions, so that if the men in the helicopter started firing, they’d fire at the moving targets. And not at…and I didn’t know what to…”
[…] [Ro’s] parents had taught her during their flight through the mountains that 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.
Chapter 66
Quotes
“Sometimes I think that when you live together for a very long time, and have children together, life is a bit like climbing trees. Up and down, up and down, you try to cope with everything, be good, you climb and climb and climb, and you hardly ever see each other along the way. You don’t notice that when you’re young, but everything changes when you have children, and sometimes it feels like you hardly ever see the person you married anymore. You’re parents and teammates, first and foremost, and being married slips down the list of priorities. But you…well, you keep climbing trees, and see each other along the way.”
“This isn’t just an apartment, it’s my home, I don’t want to hand it over to someone who’s just going to be passing through, to make money from it. I want someone who’s going to love living here, like I have. Maybe that’s hard for a young person to understand.”
That wasn’t true. There wasn’t a single person in the apartment who didn’t understand perfectly.
