My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

Louisa is a teenager, the best kind of human. The evidence for this is very simple: little children think teenagers are the best humans, and teenagers think teenagers are the best humans, the only people who don’t think that teenagers are the best humans are adults. Which is obviously because adults are the worst kind of humans.

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.

Fish was murdered by reality. She was suffocated by the claustrophobia of being trapped on this planet, she died of being sad all the time.

There is a sort of happiness so overwhelming that it is almost unbearable, your soul seems to kick its way through your bones.

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

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.

but humans are full of crap you can’t see. We break in the invisible parts.

Everyone dies, of course, every single person, but very few get to understand that they’re dying.

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.

Ted’s chest hurts, like crying without oxygen, because grief does so many strange things to people, and one of those things is that we forget how to breathe.

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,

one final little beat of his heart, and then the world is smaller.

“I knew him since we were little, 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.

and most of all angry at death for having such good taste. Always taking the best first.

For a while he was deliriously happy and unhappy at the same time, always one or the other, until in the end he couldn’t tell the difference.

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

“Because loyalty is a superpower.”

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

The most dangerous place on earth is inside us.

sometimes you don’t appreciate your own blessings until you see the envy in someone else.

“I would rather die of passion than of boredom!”

You can’t love someone out of addiction, all the oceans are the tears of those who have tried. We’re not allowed to die for our children, the universe won’t let us, because then there wouldn’t be any mothers left.

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

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.

Yet the most remarkable thing about losing a parent is that you don’t even need to miss them for their loss to be felt. The basic function of a parent is just to exist. You have to be there, like ballast in a boat, because otherwise your child capsizes.

Grief is a luxury for those living an easier life.

And only then did it feel like Ted’s dad was really dead. That’s why he always thinks of himself as an adult when he thinks back to that summer, because he was never a child again after that day.

It is an act of violence when an adult yells at a child, all adults know that deep down, because all adults were once little. Yet we still do it. Time after time, we fail at being human beings.

because that was the worst sort of gossip: the sort that is disguised as concern.

“In a library. You don’t have to put up with reality there. It’s as if thousands of strangers have given away their imaginary friends, they’re sitting on the shelves and calling to you as you walk past.

he and Mom weren’t like two magnets. They were like two colors. Once they were mixed together, there was no way of separating them.”

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.

She said people like her and me couldn’t be with each other, because you can’t both be broken and crazy. You need to have one of you who’s ordinary.”

People always say that you should live as if every day was your last, but when you have children you realize that you have to live as if every day was their first.

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

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