My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

And she’s particularly angry about rich people buying art, because rich people are the worst sort of adults, and the worst way to vandalize art is actually to put a damn price tag on it.

Obviously none of them dares to actually talk about the paintings on the walls, they’re far too frightened of accidentally thinking the wrong thing, someone else needs to think something first so they can know what they’re allowed to love.

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.

Fish was murdered by reality. She was suffocated by the claustrophobia of being trapped on this planet, she died of being sad all the time.

The richer people like her get, the fewer things they like, until eventually they become so rich that they even hate other rich people, and that’s actually the only thing Louisa almost likes about them.

Imagination is a child’s only weapon.

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

Because in an ugly place, he was born with so much beauty inside him that it was like an act of rebellion. In a world full of sledgehammers, his art was a declaration of war.

Joar was good at mending engines, because in them he could always see what was broken, but humans are full of crap you can’t see. We break in the invisible parts. So Joar didn’t know how to say that he loved the artist, and instead he roared: “Just paint! Just win that fucking competition!”

“Life is long, Louisa. Everyone will tell you that it’s short, but they’re lying. It’s a long, long life.”

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.

Not to be mean, but healthy people aren’t quite right in the head, the artist thinks. 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.

It’s an act of magnificent rebellion to do meaningless things, to waste time, to swim and drink soda and sleep late.

That’s all of life. All we can hope for. You mustn’t think about the fact that it might end, because then you live like a coward, you never love too much or sing too loudly. You have to take it for granted, the artist thinks, the whole thing: sunrises and slow Sunday mornings and water balloons and another person’s breath against your neck. That’s the only courageous thing a person can do.

Art is so big, so unfathomable, that it teaches us to mourn for strangers.

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.

The world is extremely inventive, it has plenty of ways of breaking children.

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

The most dangerous thing you can give evil is free time, because that meant darker jealousy and deeper paranoia and more empty bottles.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

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

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

Tyrants can’t be beaten, only destroyed, and no help was on its way.

No one tells you when you’re young that when you’re middle-aged, you can’t cry attractively anymore, the slightest little emotion can make you look like you’ve fallen through ice.

“Bullies always have small hearts but good memories,” she replies.

When her husband got cancer, she had to be both mother and father to the boys, 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.

“All children are born with wings,” she had whispered. “It’s just that the world is full of people who try to tear them off.

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.”

sometimes you don’t appreciate your own blessings until you see the envy in someone else.

“You’re an artist if you create something! You’re an artist if you don’t see the world the way it is, if you hate white walls! No one else decides what art is, 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! Become whatever you want, but don’t become one of them.

“He paints like the birds sing.”

“You can’t trust them, have you ever seen the floor of a men’s bathroom? And those creatures are actually allowed to make political decisions? And drive cars? Do we really want to put people who can’t even piss straight in charge of all the horsepower in the world? We shouldn’t even put them in charge of one horse!”

Yet the most remarkable thing about losing a parent is that you don’t even need to miss them for their loss to be felt. 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.

But there’s no harder person on the planet than a romantic with a broken heart.”

Ted explains that 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.

Their dad had worked at the factory, just like their mom, to give their kids a better life. Trying to be a musician, following their passion, that sort of thing was for parents who only wanted to give themselves a better life.

“It isn’t like it is in movies, Ted. It’s different in real life. But Dad once told me, when he was really fucking drunk, that he and Mom weren’t like two magnets. They were like two colors. Once they were mixed together, there was no way of separating them.”

That’s an extra cruelty that cancer brings, Ted thought, when you’re waiting for everything to go back to normal again.

It’s hard to tell a story, any story, but it’s almost impossible if it’s your own. You always start at the wrong end, always say too much or too little, always miss the most important parts.

violent man is a sickness for all around him. Violence is a plague that spreads through everybody it comes into contact with…,”

The good days were never good, they were a lie, they never lasted. There were just enough of them for his mom to believe that the bad ones were somehow her fault.

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

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.