My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

Surely taking life for granted is the whole point of being here, because what else are we doing? 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? Endless! Imagination is the only thing that stops us from thinking about death every second. And when we aren’t thinking? Oh, those are all our very best moments, when we’re wasting our lives. It’s an act of magnificent rebellion to do meaningless things, to waste time, to swim and drink soda and sleep late. To be silly and frivolous, to laugh at stupid little jokes and tell stupid little stories. Or to paint big paintings, the biggest you can manage, and to try to learn to whisper in color. To look for a way to show other people: this was me, these were my humans, these were our farts. These were our bodies, and they were small, far too small, because they couldn’t contain all our love.

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. The vibration of his laughter, the smell of his skin, his phone number. How can someone who meant everything to Ted become… nothing at all? It’s the incomprehensibility of death that drives people mad, so that we forget how to breathe and how to walk, until we spend whole nights stumbling about in dark rooms, calling and calling, trying to understand how there can be a phone number that no longer belongs to anyone.

The artist was an observer, he couldn’t bear to be observed, the world always gets those mixed up.

The artist’s bookcases were full of poets, like the bookcases of anyone trying to find out how everyone else copes.

the artist didn’t give her the painting because it was his inheritance, he gave it to her because he realized that she was the inheritance. Art is what we leave of ourselves in other people.

“Art is coincidence, love is chaos,”

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. But art doesn’t need critics, art has enough enemies already. Art needs friends.”

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.

It’s a long life, but fast, one single step in the right direction can be enough.

It is probably never easy for anyone to return to the place where they grew up, there’s no way to forget who you are there, no matter how hard you’ve tried to become someone else.

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.

“Do you think God exists?” Ali asked her friends. “Yes,” Kimkim replied, running his pencil across the drawing so gently that it was impossible to know if it made a difference on the paper or just inside him. Joar was breathing hard. “Damned if I know… I don’t even think all the people who go to church every Sunday believe in God. I think they just need company. To feel that they belong to a group.” Kimkim nodded gently and replied: “But I don’t think that means that God doesn’t exist, Joar. I think maybe that’s what God is.”

“The main character and the hero. They aren’t the same thing.”

“You’re all the same, all of you. You can’t abandon people who need you,” Louisa says. “You’re one of us,” Joar replies, and that sets a new record for the kindest thing he’s said to her.

You never get over death. Not if you’re someone who loves.

Louisa asks, then asks immediately: “How do you cope with death?” It’s Christian’s mother who answers: “It’s art that helps me cope. Because art is a fragile magic, just like love, and that’s humanity’s only defense against death. That we create and paint and dance and fall in love, that’s our rebellion against eternity. Everything beautiful is a shield. Vincent van Gogh wrote: ‘I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.’ ”