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.

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.

Joar said it with the best intentions, it was just that no one had taught him how to make his words sound like that.

The artist? He was good at seeing the beauty in everything, that happens if you’re no good at seeing it in yourself.

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.

because grief does so many strange things to people, and one of those things is that we forget how to breathe.

“On your gravestone I’m going to write: ‘I love you and I believe in you.’ ”

That the world shrinks without him, because instead of him there is just emptiness.

How can someone who meant everything to Ted become… nothing at all?

Life is long, his friend had said in the hospital, but he didn’t mention the fact that almost every moment hurts when you have to live it alone.

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

Everything the artist drew came from a place in his head that he could only get to if he wasn’t looking for it.

“You know, sometimes I wonder what I did wrong. If it’s my fault that the boy is like he is.” The other men all told him it wasn’t his fault. They all agreed that there was something wrong with the boy, of course, they just objected to the part about who was to blame.

The less he had to give, the more everyone wanted.

calm and safe and contented. Everything a person can wish for.

But there’s a difference between being loved and receiving love,”

Attention was lethal, that was how you ended up being bullied and beaten.

“Because loyalty is a superpower.”

“No. It isn’t hard at all. You loved each other so much that you were scared of accidentally breaking each other.”

The janitor looked ashamed at that, sometimes you don’t appreciate your own blessings until you see the envy in someone else.

“That’s because you don’t paint things the way they look, you paint them the way they feel,” the janitor replied.

“What I hate most isn’t that people die. What I hate most is that they’re dead. That I’m alive, without them.”

She envied their self-confidence most of all. They knew who they were, because they had families, they had inherited a belief that they belonged in every room they walked into.

You must live with each other, not only alongside each other.”

constantly having to tense your body not to cry, because you know that if you start, you’ll never be able to stop.

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?

“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.

“You’re all the same, all of you. You can’t abandon people who need you,” Louisa says.

Children aren’t responsible for their parents’ happiness, but they still try.