My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

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.

Becoming a parent? Someone said it’s an invisible tidal wave that hits you with such force that you lose your breath and never quite get it back. You spend your whole life gasping, someone else said, because it’s a love so immense that it squeezes the air out of your lungs. Everyone else thinks you look like the same person afterward, a third said, but you don’t understand any of it, because there’s such a clear before and after. A completely new you.

Imagination is a child’s only weapon.

because when it comes to death, the living are pretty crazy. They don’t want to see anyone who’s ill, they don’t even want to think about illness, and if they absolutely have to, they sigh and say things like: “Oh, it reminds you not to take life for granted!”

because grief does so many strange things to people, and one of those things is that we forget how to breathe. As if the body’s first instinct is to grieve itself to death.

because in grief we are reminded that we’re human beings. 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.

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.

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

the ultimate expression of love is nagging, we don’t nag anyone the way we nag the people we love. All parents know that,

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.

Children have two worlds, the one they have been given and the one they can dream about,

“Death is public but dying is private, the very last private thing we have,”

unhappy nor too happy, just everything in between, calm and safe and contented. Everything a person can wish for.

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

The brain is so peculiar, the things that get stuck in it.

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.”

The most dangerous place on earth is inside us.

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.

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.

That’s how mercilessly great the responsibility of being a parent is, that you have to be able to take her for granted. Like food in the freezer. Like ballast in a boat.

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.

Sometimes we remember the last moments before a great catastrophe as more beautiful than they actually were.

Life is long, but it moves at high speed, a single step here or there can be enough to ruin everything.

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

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.