My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

That’s why rich adults hate the sort of thing that Louisa paints on the walls of buildings, not because they love walls, but because they hate the fact that there are beautiful things that are free.

but first you have to realize that rich adults hardly ever notice anything, apart from mirrors.

painted as if the artist saw them so intensively and dreamed them so beautifully that he learned how to whisper in color.

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

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.

Once upon a time, church bells used to ring for the dead, now it’s telephones,

The most dangerous thing you can give evil is free time,

His mom grew plants that were a small revolution every day, an armed resistance of tenderness in an apartment besieged by hatred and violence.

with the chance to feel that he stole more moments from death than death had from him.

at the end of his life he only wished for what almost all of us wish for: to have our childhood summers back.

art is coincidence. A beautiful painting is the sum total of a person, what has happened to them,

Ted loves adventures, he just absolutely doesn’t want to participate in them.

he only knew her as a shadow of a person, the world is full of them, their hearts beat and

their eyes are open, but they live like they’re enclosed in glass bubbles.

The most dangerous place on earth is inside us.

and of course babies are the very worst-functioning versions of people.

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.

His friends sat around him as if their bodies were shielding a flame from the wind.

she was terrible in the morning, because she always woke up happy, and that’s a complete misunderstanding of what a morning is.

She stopped trying after that, loneliness was better than disappointment.

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

“The birds are like tourists. They screech and make a mess, but you’re not allowed to shoot them…”

The middle of summer vacation is a quite specific sort of sadness.

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 isn’t the same thing,” Joar says. “What?” “The main character and the hero. They aren’t the same thing.”

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.

there are restaurants with complicated names and shops no one can understand what they’re selling, and there are angry people with little dogs everywhere.