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.

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

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.

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

There is a particular way of missing someone, the way you can only miss your best humans when you’re fourteen years old, when you go your separate ways outside your houses and your skin feels cold when they turn away.

A lack of self-confidence is a devastating virus. There’s no cure.

When they all laughed, they belonged together.

Ted? He had made it his responsibility that none of the people he loved would die. That’s a terrible burden for a person. Your shoulders creak, your skeleton shrinks, in the end you can hardly walk.

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

in the face of death grown men are like children, we think that if we close our eyes, we become invisible.

no one can stop you loving whatever you like, the cynics and critics can have control of all the other crap on the planet… but they can’t decide how hard your heart beats!

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.”

Joar would have just carried on driving, as far away as possible. But she didn’t dare leave her husband, and Joar couldn’t leave her. Their prison was invisible.

All these years and he has never even considered that. It’s hard to be little, hard to be big, hard to be everything in between.

“A violent man is a sickness for all around him.

“The important thing is that you understand that you belong there,”

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.

Disappointment is a powerful thing. Used correctly, it is stronger than fear, more terrible than physical pain, if you see it in the eyes of the one you love, you’ll do almost anything to make it stop.

“Ted gives everyone more love. But I think you’ve both given each other the same amount: everything you had.”

Joar sits there under the stars and he too loses Ali all over again. That’s the worst thing about death, that it happens over and over again. That the human body can cry forever.

‘I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.’ ”

He stood at the airport a few times too. But it’s scary to go back to a place where you hurt so badly and felt so small as he did here, you think you’re going to become the same person again.