My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

She doesn’t like her body because there’s too much of it, she doesn’t like her voice because it’s too deep, she doesn’t like her brain because it always tells her to talk when she’s nervous. Most of all she doesn’t like her heart because it’s always nervous. Stupid, stupid heart.

Everything else should be big, except for taxes and sandwiches.

Adults always think they can protect children by stopping them from going to dangerous places, but every teenager knows that’s pointless, because the most dangerous place on earth is inside us. Fragile hearts break in palaces and in dark alleys alike.

Becoming a parent? Someone said it’s an invisible tidal wave that hits you with such force that you lose your breath and never quite get it back. You spend your whole life gasping, someone else said, because it’s a love so immense that it squeezes the air out of your lungs. Everyone else thinks you look like the same person afterward, a third said, but you don’t understand any of it, because there’s such a clear before and after. A completely new you.

Art is empathy.

Because in an ugly place, he was born with so much beauty inside him that it was like an act of rebellion. In a world full of sledgehammers, his art was a declaration of war.

Joar was good at mending engines, because in them he could always see what was broken, but humans are full of crap you can’t see. We break in the invisible parts.

He would often try to think that perhaps that has to be the case: that our teenage years have to simultaneously be the brightest light and the darkest depths, because that’s how we learn to figure out our horizons.

Surely taking life for granted is the whole point of being here, because what else are we doing? We’re a bunch of lonely apes on a rock in the universe, our breath consists of eighty percent nitrogen, twenty percent oxygen, and one hundred percent anxiety. The only thing we can take for granted is that everyone we have ever met and everyone we have ever known and everyone we have ever loved will die.

“Being human is to grieve, constantly.”

We want to look up to men, but we’d prefer to feel sorry for cats, that’s how the world works.

that happens to us all when the love of our life falls asleep for the last time, because when the soul leaves the body, evidently the last thing it does is tie our shoelaces together. In the weeks following the death we trip over thin air. It’s the soul’s fault.

Art teaches us to mourn for strangers.

Grief is a selfish bacteria, it demands all our attention.

Art isn’t chronological. Everything the artist drew came from a place in his head that he could only get to if he wasn’t looking for it.

the ultimate expression of love is nagging, we don’t nag anyone the way we nag the people we love. All parents know that, and so do all best friends.

Adults often think that self-confidence is something a child learns, but little kids are by their nature always invincible, it’s self-doubt that needs to be taught.

It’s the job of fourteen-year-olds not to be great at things, the only expectation they have to live up to is to be morons, they’re put on this earth so their moms and dads will support the headache-pill industry.

Art is a moment. Art is being a reason. Art is coping with being alive for one more week.

Angry at himself, angry at the artist, and most of all angry at death for having such good taste. Always taking the best first.

“Death is public but dying is private, the very last private thing we have,”

You think you’re going to be young forever, but suddenly you reach an age where getting up from a chair can’t be taken for granted, it requires planning,

It’s so strange, he thinks, the way we remember things. What we try to remember and what we fight to forget.

when you’re approaching forty perhaps you start to melt internally.

doesn’t take any strength at all to crush someone’s self-confidence if you know where to stomp.

You can’t love someone out of addiction, all the oceans are the tears of those who have tried. We’re not allowed to die for our children, the universe won’t let us, because then there wouldn’t be any mothers left.

Art is what we leave of ourselves in other people.”

“What I hate most isn’t that people die. What I hate most is that they’re dead. That I’m alive, without them.”

He’s thought so many times as an adult that it’s a lie that people are scared of being alone, because what we fear is being abandoned. You can choose to be alone, but no one chooses to be left.

Yet the most remarkable thing about losing a parent is that you don’t even need to miss them for their loss to be felt.

People who have never been beaten up don’t understand the recklessness demanded of the person doing the beating, what must be missing from someone like that, or what happens inside the person getting beaten.

he and Mom weren’t like two magnets. They were like two colors. Once they were mixed together, there was no way of separating them.”

Stories are complicated, memories are merciless, our brains only store a few moments from the best days of our lives, but we remember every second of the worst.

“The biggest threat to men’s health, statistically, is heart disease,” Ted says thoughtfully at the kitchen table. “Do you know what the biggest threat to women’s health is?” “Men,” Louisa says, because all women know that.

Children aren’t responsible for their parents’ happiness, but they still try.