My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

Because sometimes Louisa is a genius, but sometimes she isn’t a genius, and the problem is that the genius and the non-genius share a brain.

But the thing that’s so incredible about God is that God understands people’s needs, so there are always bathrooms in churches,

rich people love tiny food. Everything else should be big, except for taxes and sandwiches.

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.

The richer people like her get, the fewer things they like, until eventually they become so rich that they even hate other rich people, and that’s actually the only thing Louisa almost likes about them.

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.

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

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.

When you’re fourteen you know every corner of each other, all the weakest and most fragile places, and of course you can’t be allowed to become an adult with all that knowledge, because an adult would never be able to keep secrets like that.

he was born with so much beauty inside him that it was like an act of rebellion.

Joar was good at mending engines, because in them he could always see what was broken, but humans are full of crap you can’t see. We break in the invisible parts.

She bites her lip and her brain starts bullying her again. So she stares down at the ground and mutters some of the worst swearing the homeless man has ever heard.

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.

We’re a bunch of lonely apes on a rock in the universe, our breath consists of eighty percent nitrogen, twenty percent oxygen, and one hundred percent anxiety. The only thing we can take for granted is that everyone we have ever met and everyone we have ever known and everyone we have ever loved will die. So how great must our imaginations be for us to even summon up the enthusiasm to get out of bed each morning?

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.

He’s never been able to explain that all his paintings are an attempt to show how beautiful he wishes he actually was.

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.

at daybreak his death will belong to everyone and everything. But for a very short while that night in that hospital room, it only belongs to Ted.

Life is long, his friend had said in the hospital, but he didn’t mention the fact that almost every moment hurts when you have to live it alone.

Nothing weighs more than someone else’s belief in you.

I’ve… always known him,” he replies, because with the sort of friendship they had, there was never a “before.”

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.

which is quite a talent, being so clumsy that you’re your own most likely cause of death.

the problem with never wanting to disappoint your friends is that when your friends are in Heaven, they can see everything you do, the bastards.

It’s the job of fourteen-year-olds not to be great at things, the only expectation they have to live up to is to be morons, they’re put on this earth so their moms and dads will support the headache-pill industry.

it wasn’t even a drawing of the sea to start with, it was a drawing of clouds, because clouds are nothing and that was how he saw himself. Everything else? That was what Joar saw in him.

As an adult, the artist would be told that great artistry is something that has to find its way out of a person, but for him it was something that needed to find its way in. Because for him, art was love. Grief. A story.

In their world it isn’t the artist who should be admired, it’s the owner, because only something which has a price can have any value. That’s why the children on the painting are so important that they’re protected by guards, but the children on the pier in real life could die without anyone even caring.

The adults at school thought he was cold and hard, that he didn’t have feelings. It was the opposite that was the problem, for God’s sake. This was a boy who cared about animals and cilantro and hated fighting. He only fought for those he loved.

one day he would be grown-up and celebrated around the world, and would realize that he still only knew the same simple things: Art is a moment. Art is being a reason. Art is coping with being alive for one more week.

Having a heart is heavy, far too heavy for some of us.

Everyone he met told him they loved him, hardly anyone survives that.

My art is only an investment now, everyone who owns a piece of me hopes I’ll die, because nothing is more valuable at auction than an unfulfilled life.”

You think you’re going to be young forever, but suddenly you reach an age where getting up from a chair can’t be taken for granted, it requires planning,

It’s strange, the things you remember from your childhood, but perhaps what you forget is even stranger. When you think about summers growing up, it feels like the sun was always shining, there’s never any wind or rain in nostalgia.

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

One time the artist read an article suggesting that people will soon be able to live until they’re one hundred and fifty, which Ted thought sounded unbearable, because at this rate he wouldn’t be doing anything by then except peeing.

They only had each other for a little more than a year. Who has time to get to know someone, really know them, in that time? If you so much as ask the question, you weren’t there, you’ve never fallen that madly in love, never been addicted to another person’s breath. It wouldn’t have made any difference if Joar and Ali’s love had lasted eighty years, it was already everything right from the start,

the artist would often sit on the floor drawing birds for her. She was envious of them, not because they flew south for the winter but because they flew back home again in spring, that they were so confident they knew where their home was.

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.

He goes to the bathroom again. He seems to have reached the age where he needs to go even though he hasn’t drunk anything since the last time, as if his body is inventing its own liquid, when you’re approaching forty perhaps you start to melt internally.

“I wanted to be able to stop time. So my mom would never lose my dad, so Joar wouldn’t get beaten by his old man, so… so I would never run out of people.”

The conductor smiles with the uncertainty you feel when there’s a fifty percent chance the person you’re talking to is joking, and a fifty percent chance that she’s a psychopath.

Their mom had such clear definitions of her sons’ masculinity that Ted can only assume it was because she knew what this world does to girls.

that’s the worst thing about being a parent: that almost everyone does their best, but almost all fail regardless.

So the moment is ruined. You can always trust reality to do that.

Ted loves adventures, he just absolutely doesn’t want to participate in them. He wants to be one of the people in the houses, reading about adventures in a book, like a normal person.

No one teaches anyone to paint, all we learn are rules and limitations, what we aren’t supposed to do.

It was such a nice thing to say that there was hardly any space for all the words inside the boy who would become world-famous, so he was forced to grow several inches instead.

They never understood how special it is to be abnormal.