My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

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.

She cried when she realized that she was a person without memories, but Fish sat beside her and said: “To Hell with that, why should your stupid brain get to decide what happened and what didn’t? You can still keep that memory, it’s yours!”

A person without memories <\3

And on the back of the postcard of the painting, Louisa wrote a message, the one she would have wanted, as if she had been longed for and loved: See you soon. —Mom.

Grown men don’t have enough things they’re afraid of on this planet to become good at running.

They don’t get any of that, the ignorant, useless rich people back in that old church, because they aren’t in enough pain.

He was good at seeing the beauty in everything, that happens if you’re no good at seeing it in yourself.

About being no one at all alongside his very best no ones.

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

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.

The most dangerous thing you can give evil is free time, because that meant

darker jealousy and deeper paranoia and more empty bottles.

Until then he hadn’t known that grief is physical, an abuse of the living.

the chance to feel that he stole more moments from death than death had from him.

The artist’s bookcases were full of poets, like the bookcases of anyone trying to find out how everyone else copes.

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

Art is what we leave of ourselves in other people.

The children of addicts always know what the time is.

there’s a kind of boundary for the sort of emotions you’re prepared to share with others when you’re hardly comfortable sharing them with yourself.

Because adults like him don’t understand that adults have to be adults so that children can be children.

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. We’re not allowed to die for our children, the universe won’t let us, because then there wouldn’t be any mothers left.

You can choose to be alone, but no one chooses to be left.

Art is what can’t fit inside a person. The things that bubble over,”

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.

that 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.”

It is probably never easy for anyone to return to the place where they grew up, there’s no way to forget who you are there, no matter how hard you’ve tried to become someone else.

Time weighs more when you’re little.

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.

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?

what evil among men is like: It’s like water being heated up a little at a time. It gets worse and worse, but so slowly it’s hardly noticeable, so everyone can convince themselves that it’s probably normal, until we’re all boiling.

Women like her can never do the right thing, their men’s guilt is always theirs.

“Ted gives everyone more love. But I think you’ve both given each other the same amount: everything you had.”

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

Vincent van Gogh wrote: ‘I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.’ ”