My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

Fish was murdered by reality. She was suffocated by the claustrophobia of being trapped on this planet, she died of being sad all the time.

Louisa isn’t at all afraid of index fingers, because she isn’t an elevator button,

😂😂😂

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.

If you’re five years old when your parent leaves you, the leaving didn’t happen on one particular day, it happens every day.

that’s the age when friendship is like joining the mafia: you can’t leave it, you know too much. When you’re fourteen you know every corner of each other, all the weakest and most fragile places, and of course you can’t be allowed to become an adult with all that knowledge, because an adult would never be able to keep secrets like that.

he must have felt every single feeling inside himself all at the same time, and it must have been almost unbearable, because otherwise no one would be able to paint like that.

That something so great came out of a boy who thought so little of himself.

some of us are born in the wrong place, the whole of our childhood is like being shipwrecked on a desert island, we ache with homesickness without knowing what home is yet.

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.

Imagination is the only thing that stops us from thinking about death every second.

But he’s always been scared, scared of everything.

Because all he dreamed about was not being recognized in the street, and not being adult, and about lying on a pier with his best friends and drinking sun-warmed sodas and reading

In life we might be enemies, but when faced with death, we see the truth: we are one species, all we

have is each other, and where you go, I shall follow.

Nothing weighs more than someone else’s belief in you.

At night the teenagers lived in different realities, but at daybreak they belonged to each other again, at the crossroads between the

That was why Ted always made sure he got to the crossroads before him every morning.

A lack of self-confidence is a devastating virus. There’s no cure.

his parents were often told their child wasn’t normal. They believed that, sadly, which is why they missed out on the incredible joy of having a child who was special.

but little kids are by their nature always invincible, it’s self-doubt that needs to be taught.

at the end of his life he only wished for what almost all of us wish for: to have our childhood summers back.

“Death is public but dying is private, the very last private thing we have,” the artist had said, and there had been no fear in his voice,

The artist was an observer, he couldn’t bear to be observed, the world always gets those mixed up.

Ted’s shoulders slump, it’s a burden to hear yourself in others.

Being a parent is so strange, all our children’s pain belongs to us, but so does their joy.

Ali laughed so much that Ted can still hear the echo inside him on the train twenty-five years later.

The children of addicts always know what the time is.

The Flash’s “Life doesn’t give us purpose. We give life purpose.”

Wonder Woman’s “Which will hold greater rule over you? Your fear or your curiosity?”

Iron Man’s “Heroes are made by the paths...

Tyrants can’t be beaten, only destroyed, and no help was on its way.

“Bullies always have small hearts but good memories,” she replies.

“Because loyalty is a superpower.”

and that’s the worst thing about being a parent: that almost everyone does their best, but almost all fail regardless.

You can be whatever you want to in life, as long as you don’t become a critic! Not of other people, and not of yourself. It’s so easy to be a critic, any coward can do that.

The son loved his mom, but he only knew her as a shadow of a person, the world is full of them, their hearts beat and their eyes are open, but they live like they’re enclosed in glass bubbles.

He would never have let anyone say they were bad parents, he understood that it was practically impossible to be a good one, children are so fragile that if you’re the least bit fragile yourself, it’s hopeless right from the start. At least one of you will fall apart.

They never understood how special it is to be abnormal.

The most dangerous place on earth is inside us.

“Now you know that you don’t want to die.”

her mouth has a longer braking distance than the train.

One time I asked her why she was so obsessed with what I was thinking, and she got angry and yelled: ‘Because I want to know what’s happening inside you! Because you happened to me! You happen to me every second I’m alive!’ ”

Then he quoted his mom’s favorite poem, by Mary Oliver: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Marcel Duchamp: “Art is completed by the viewer.”

Émile Zola’s words at him: “I would rather die of passion than of boredom!”

Seeking out euphoria is a life out of balance.

they gave Fish something far crueler: promises.

The basic function of a parent is just to exist. You have to be there, like ballast in a boat, because otherwise your child capsizes.

The most dangerous creature on the planet is, and has always been, a young man.

Trying to be a musician, following their passion, that sort of thing was for parents who only wanted to give themselves a better life.