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.

It isn’t the plan’s fault, it’s just that her brain sometimes gets a bit crowded with both the genius and the non-genius having to live there together.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Louisa, who heard footsteps behind her and just assumed someone had come to murder her, the only reasonable assumption, isn’t really sure if she should apologize or throw something else.

Actually my brain

Adults often think that self-confidence is something a child learns, but little kids are by their nature always invincible, it’s self-doubt that needs to be taught.

I’d argue both are taught but open for discussion

Dear God, how they all laughed, until their spines popped like Bubble Wrap, a fart really is the best chiropractor if you know how to appreciate it.

what is it that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Then he read Maya Angelou, “When Great Trees Fall”: Our memory, suddenly sharpened, examines, gnaws on kind words unsaid, promised walks never taken.

But there’s a difference between being loved and receiving love,”

‘I love you and I believe in you.’

This was in the spring, but no one had told winter, so the temperature was still below freezing at night, and there was still ice on the roof.

This book is full of great narration like this

You can be whatever you want to in life, as long as you don’t become a critic! Not of other people, and not of yourself. It’s so easy to be a critic, any coward can do that.

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

Every time her phone rings, she still thinks someone has died.

“Call me” texts

“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?

every day may not have been the best day, but with Fish at least you knew that the day had a chance.

“Isn’t it like, totally unbelievable that we even exist? So it won’t be a tragedy when we don’t exist anymore! It’s just cool, really cool, that we happened at all.”

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.

& suicide

“Sure. Have you got a coin?”

This book makes me laugh out loud

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. Sometimes he imagines that mankind invented God just to have someone to be angry with, because you can’t be angry with a dad who’s dead, not even a little bit. Ted was most angry with God because he didn’t get more memories.

They had no words, so they let him cry, only not alone.

“Other thing, important! In restaurant, he orders food I like, always. Halfway through meal, we swap plates. You understand? You must live with each other, not only alongside each other.”

Marriage advice I’m happy to live by

They were like two colors. Once they were mixed together, there was no way of separating them.”

Joar.

WHAT

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 my favorite food in the whole world,” Ali said shyly. “Lasagna?” Ted’s mom repeated, surprised, because she had never heard a teenage girl say that. But the teenage girl shook her head and corrected her: “Your lasagna.”

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

Feels impossible to stop reliving it

even though I was drunk and told him to go to Hell. He’s bad at that, Ted is, he really can’t go to Hell…” “He doesn’t like traveling,” Louisa says.

“You sound happy,” he smiles. “I am. You sound happy too.” “Maybe I’m on my way.” “That’s all anyone can be, Ted. On our way!”