My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

Fragile hearts break in palaces and in dark alleys alike.

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

And when we aren’t 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.

That’s all of life. All we can hope for. You mustn’t think about the fact that it might end, because then you live like a coward, you never love too much or sing too loudly. You have to take it for granted, the artist thinks, the whole thing: sunrises and slow Sunday mornings and water balloons and another person’s breath against your neck. That’s the only courageous thing a person can do.

Art is so big, so unfathomable, that it teaches us to mourn for strangers.

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.

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.

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?

“You can’t trust them, have you ever seen the floor of a men’s bathroom? And those creatures are actually allowed to make political decisions? And drive cars? Do we really want to put people who can’t even piss straight in charge of all the horsepower in the world? We shouldn’t even put them in charge of one horse!”

Once he read a book that said that people with neuropsychiatric disorders need to “make friends with their brain,” but Ted and Ted’s brain are not friends, they’re classmates, forced to do a group assignment called “life” together. And it’s not going great.

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

because you can’t both be broken and crazy. You need to have one of you who’s ordinary.”

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