My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

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.

if you live as healthily as Ted does, you only have yourself to blame if you’re the last one left.

Ted sits alone and marvels at how silently an eighteen-year-old can get to her feet, without so much as a single groan or creak of the spine.

When you grow up and see how naturally a teenager moves, you realize the logic of Stone Age people dying when they were twenty-seven, because from then on, the body does everything it can do to die.

You know you’re old when you have to use soap on your head and shampoo on your ass.

People think it’s bad if someone makes you feel small, but it really isn’t.”

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

Oh so true!

Art is what we leave of ourselves in other people.

Derrick is my art

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.”

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.”

It’s a funny thing. 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?

Vincent van Gogh wrote: ‘I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.’ ”