My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

Becoming a parent? Someone said it’s an invisible tidal wave that hits you with such force that you lose your breath and never quite get it back. You spend your whole life gasping, someone else said, because it’s a love so immense that it squeezes the air out of your lungs.

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.

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.

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.

the world has spent thousands of years practicing how to puncture the lungs of children who are different.

He had made it his responsibility that none of the people he loved would die. That’s a terrible burden for a person.

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

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.