My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

Louisa has never met those boys, but they’re her people, the only people she has left on the planet.

no one could paint friendship like this without first having been a completely lonely child.

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.

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.

Then he paints, with trembling fingers, and the fact that Louisa is still standing when he’s finished is actually quite remarkable. Because her heart has left her body by then. He paints skulls.

This is when i would love this book.

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.

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

however much it annoys him, that the artist was right. She’s one of us.

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.

Art doesn’t require training, dear child, art just needs friends.”