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.

She will never be able to explain what she feels when she sees it. Maybe this is what it feels like to become a parent, she thinks: there are no words.

our breath consists of eighty percent nitrogen, twenty percent oxygen, and one hundred percent anxiety.

Art isn’t chronological. Everything the artist drew came from a place in his head that he could only get to if he wasn’t looking for it. If he was told to draw, it was like waking from a dream and trying to dream it again. A lack of self-confidence is a devastating virus. There’s no cure.

“Meet” is probably the wrong word, no one met Joar, because you don’t “meet” a natural disaster, you get hit by it.

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

Now that the train is moving again, Ted feels envious of all the people living in the houses it passes, because they’re already home. He gets slightly annoyed at people saying that the world rushes past outside the train windows, because it’s the train that’s doing the rushing, the world is standing still.

We’re not allowed to die for our children, the universe won’t let us, because then there wouldn’t be any mothers left.

Art is what we leave of ourselves in other people.”

Ted is dreaming a lovely dream, about a day without a name. Because a really good summer vacation should only really have two days: the first, and the last. All the ones in between should be nameless, it shouldn’t matter if it’s Tuesday or Sunday. In a good summer, everything is all just bicycles and comic books and salt water, time being wasted with the sun on your face. One or two small farts, one or two little giggles.

Ted and Ted’s brain are not friends, they’re classmates, forced to do a group assignment called “life” together. And it’s not going great.

It’s a funny thing. The person we fall in love with, we hardly ever call by their name. Because it’s somehow just so obvious that it’s you I’m talking to, that it’s you I’m always thinking of. Who else?