My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

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.

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. Adults will never understand that, because they don’t laugh at farts, and how the hell are you supposed to trust the judgment of someone like that with something as important as art?

If you’ve had people who can make you laugh like that, you never forget it. If not, words are pointless.

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.

“Life is long, Louisa. Everyone will tell you that it’s short, but they’re lying. It’s a long, long life.”

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.

They knew each other without words, and sometimes that was unbearable.

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.

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

“Being human is to grieve, constantly.”

His best human died, and he can’t stop feeling sad, he’s sad all the time, sad everywhere.

Ted’s chest hurts, like crying without oxygen, because grief does so many strange things to people, and one of those things is that we forget how to breathe. As if the body’s first instinct is to grieve itself to death.

because in grief we are reminded that we’re human beings.

That’s the very hardest thing to understand about death: nothing. That the world shrinks without him, because instead of him there is just emptiness.

It’s the incomprehensibility of death that drives people mad, so that we forget how to breathe and how to walk, until we spend whole nights stumbling about in dark rooms, calling and calling, trying to understand how there can be a phone number that no longer belongs to anyone.

Art teaches us to mourn for strangers.

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

The world is extremely inventive, it has plenty of ways of breaking children.

As an adult, the artist would be told that great artistry is something that has to find its way out of a person, but for him it was something that needed to find its way in. Because for him, art was love. Grief. A story.

It’s all too heavy, far too heavy for some of us, but we carry on anyway.

For a while he was deliriously happy and unhappy at the same time, always one or the other, until in the end he couldn’t tell the difference.

It’s hard to cope with seeing yourself in someone else.

They knew nothing about her darkness, how much pain she was in, that her thin body was a raging fire inside.

Art is a nakedness, you have to be free to decide when you’re comfortable with it, and with whom.

You loved each other so much that you were scared of accidentally breaking each other.”

Great art is a small break from human despair,

They were both in pain, but just then they were no longer held captive on Earth.

No one can explain why some fourteen-year-olds want to die. Nature gains nothing from unhappy children, yet they are still walking around everywhere, without the words to describe their anxiety. Because how could you even begin to explain such a feeling to someone who has been happy and secure all their life?

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.

The most dangerous place on earth is inside us.

You can’t love someone out of addiction, all the oceans are the tears of those who have tried.

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

The curse is the same for everyone who has loved someone who died of an overdose: we think that if we could just have been with our human every moment of every day, then it would never have happened. It never stops being our fault.

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.

A person needs to keep something alive, you understand? Otherwise: we are not people.”

Ted watches them go and thinks exhaustedly that it doesn’t matter if life is long or short, it isn’t time that’s the problem, it’s the speed. Far too much happens when you’re alive, everything goes so damn fast, how are you supposed to have time to be a human being?

The middle of summer vacation is a quite specific sort of sadness.

It is an act of violence when an adult yells at a child, all adults know that deep down, because all adults were once little. Yet we still do it. Time after time, we fail at being human beings.

It’s hard to be little, hard to be big, hard to be everything in between.

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.

Sometimes we remember the last moments before a great catastrophe as more beautiful than they actually were.

The world is full of miracles, but none greater than how far a young person can be carried by someone else’s belief in them.

It’s a funny thing. The person we fall in love with, we hardly ever call by their name. Because it’s somehow just so obvious that it’s you I’m talking to, that it’s you I’m always thinking of. Who else?

She said people like her and me couldn’t be with each other, because you can’t both be broken and crazy. You need to have one of you who’s ordinary.”

You never get over death. Not if you’re someone who loves.

That’s the worst thing about death, that it happens over and over again. That the human body can cry forever.

“It’s art that helps me cope. Because art is a fragile magic, just like love, and that’s humanity’s only defense against death. That we create and paint and dance and fall in love, that’s our rebellion against eternity.