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Louisa is a teenager, the best kind of human. The evidence for this is very simple: little children think teenagers are the best humans, and teenagers think teenagers are the best humans, the only people who don’t think that teenagers are the best humans are adults. Which is obviously because adults are the worst kind of humans.
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.
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.
:(
For someone who’s surprisingly tall, Louisa is surprisingly good at being invisible. The secret to that is knowing that you don’t mean anything to anyone. That you’re worthless.
sad but relatable
Louisa isn’t at all afraid of index fingers, because she isn’t an elevator button,
lol
Art is empathy.
Imagination is a child’s only weapon.
Grown men don’t have enough things they’re afraid of on this planet to become good at running.
This is a painting of laughter, and you can only understand that if you’re full of holes, because then laughter is a small treasure.
If you’ve had people who can make you laugh like that, you never forget it. If not, words are pointless. Either you have smelled a remarkable fart, or you become one of those adults who stands at an auction a quarter of a century later thinking it’s a painting of the sea simply because the painting is called The One of the Sea. Adults really are out of their minds.
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.
We break in the invisible parts.
There was a long silence before one of them started to giggle, then all of them broke down laughing. Even the artist, eventually, and when he did, not even Joar could be angry. That was how all the best things started.
Out of all the things the artist would paint for the rest of his life, Joar was the hardest, because it was never possible to paint him the way he felt about his friend.
She offers the pack to the man, and he takes one, very hesitantly. Louisa can’t help thinking that’s a kind thing to do, taking the risk of getting lung cancer out of sheer politeness.
“My friend Fish couldn’t handle being alive. She was hurting too much. But I think I’d like to try, to be alive.”
The artist? He was good at seeing the beauty in everything, that happens if you’re no good at seeing it in yourself.
In the fullness of time the artist would find a way to paint laughter, make everything beautiful, because that was how he wanted to remember those days when they were fourteen. Because there was beauty too.
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.
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.
How could the sea be big enough to have room for their hearts? Incomprehensible.
thinking? Oh, those are all our very best moments, when we’re wasting our lives. It’s an act of magnificent rebellion to do meaningless things, to waste time, to swim and drink soda and sleep late. To be silly and frivolous, to laugh at stupid little jokes and tell stupid little stories. Or to paint big paintings, the biggest you can manage, and to try to learn to whisper in color. To look for a way to show other people: this was me, these were my humans, these were our farts. These were our bodies, and they were small, far too small, because they couldn’t contain all our love. That’s all of
...more
He’s almost forty years old and he’s lived a long life, remarkably long, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar. He has seen the world, fallen in love on white beaches, danced to loud music on warm nights, and wasted slow mornings under soft sheets. He has painted and giggled and sung. All the things he never dared dream about when he was fourteen and had cuts on his wrists and pills in his backpack. He has lived, dear Lord, how he has lived.
adults are always a lot more useless than teenagers hope.
About being no one at all alongside his very best no ones.
That there is a speed at which a heart can beat that you can’t remember when you’ve stopped being young, art that is a joy so overwhelming that you almost can’t bear it.
Ted takes his hand gently and promises: “On your gravestone I’m going to write: ‘I love you and I believe in you.’ ” “I love you and I believe in you too,” the artist smiles, resting his head heavily on Ted’s arm.
“Don’t cry for me, Ted. I got to experience everything. It’s been a long, long life, and at the end of it I got to see something unbelievably beautiful.” Ted nods disconsolately. “That girl’s paintings?” “No. You. I got to see you.”
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.
It’s been a long, long life, and at the end of it the artist manages to make someone he loves laugh out loud, so that every single wall sings. It would take less to make you believe in God.
What happens next is both stupid and logical, much like most of life, really.
with the sort of friendship they had, there was never a “before.”
laughter heals all wounds,
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. It really, really isn’t the job of fourteen-year-olds to be geniuses.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
“I said it’s a waste, being as annoying as you are, you might as well be someone’s annoying dad.”
lol
Being a parent is so strange, all our children’s pain belongs to us, but so does their joy.
One time the artist read an article suggesting that people will soon be able to live until they’re one hundred and fifty, which Ted thought sounded unbearable, because at this rate he wouldn’t be doing anything by then except peeing.
“Don’t you like Jesus? Some people who don’t like Jesus don’t like Easter. But you know who else probably didn’t like Easter? Jesus.”
she's got a point
there’s a difference between being loved and receiving love,”
He feels like telling her that the artist didn’t give her the painting because it was his inheritance, he gave it to her because he realized that she was the inheritance. Art is what we leave of ourselves in other people. But he doesn’t quite know how to say that.
“It was okay,” Louisa says, in the way you do if you have so many bruises and scars all over your body that eventually you can’t be bothered to think it might not be normal.
damn
They only had each other for a little more than a year. Who has time to get to know someone, really know them, in that time? If you so much as ask the question, you weren’t there, you’ve never fallen that madly in love, never been addicted to another person’s breath. It wouldn’t have made any difference if Joar and Ali’s love had lasted eighty years, it was already everything right from the start, bright light and loud bangs and heart attacks.
Only then did Ali look out at the first row of the audience. There sat her friends. Joar, Ted, and the artist. Wearing dresses.
real friends
It was worth every blow if Ali realized she wasn’t so damn alone, at least not all the damn time. Who gets a friend like that? Hardly anyone.
There was something about the way you told the story. That she said ‘I believe in you’ when you said ‘I love you.’ When you’ve been raped, that’s pretty much the biggest thing you can do, I think. Believing in someone, like really… believe in them. Trust them. Especially a boy.”
“Because loyalty is a superpower.”
Art is what we leave of ourselves in other people.”
it didn’t matter if we lived to be eighty years old, because that’s only a billion different nows, and one really good now is enough.”
