My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

Because rich people love reminding each other about how incredibly rich they are, so rich that they can buy things from God.

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

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.

“It’s unbelievable that evolution even gave boys penises, because you can’t be trusted with anything,”

“If there is nothing but what we make in this world, brothers, let us make good.”

“Bullies always have small hearts but good memories,”

and no doubt she did her best, and that’s the worst thing about being a parent: that almost everyone does their best, but almost all fail regardless.

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.”

but the artist was like a paper boat heading for a waterfall.

Adults never understand that for a child who uses drawing to escape from reality, being made to do it on command is unbearable.

“The dinosaurs died out, but you and I and all these idiots managed to survive? We do nothing but try to find ways to destroy everything that’s keeping us alive, but we’re still here?”

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.

children know hardly anything about their parents, even if they live with them their whole lives. Because all we know about them is as moms and dads, nothing about who they were before that. We never saw them young, when they still fantasized about all the things that could happen, instead of regretting all the things that never did.

Stories are complicated, memories are merciless, our brains only store a few moments from the best days of our lives, but we remember every second of the worst.

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.

“The biggest threat to men’s health, statistically, is heart disease,” Ted says thoughtfully at the kitchen table. “Do you know what the biggest threat to women’s health is?” “Men,” Louisa says, because all women know that.

“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.”

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.

“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.’ ”