My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

Louisa is a teenager, the best kind of human. The evidence for this is very 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.

rich people love reminding each other about how incredibly rich they are,

jellyfish, like guards, have neither backbones nor brains.

the room is full of people busily trying to see their hairstyles in the reflection of their Champagne glasses.

You get used to so many strange things when you grow up without parents, you soon get so used to having one single person who you love that it’s impossible to shake the habit.

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.

That there is a speed at which a heart can beat that you can’t remember when you’ve stopped being young.

For someone who’s surprisingly tall, Louisa is surprisingly good at being invisible. The secret to that is knowing that you don’t mean anything to anyone. That you’re worthless.

she knows all too well what young people and backpacks mean.

I’m insanely good at destroying things, lady. Everyone I love dies.

So Louisa kept it. 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.

They had one summer on that pier twenty-five years ago which felt like it was going to last forever, because that’s how all summers must feel when you’re about to turn fifteen, that’s the age when friendship is like joining the mafia: you can’t leave it, you know too much.

“Do you think we’ll all still be best friends when we’re grown-up?” Joar replied calmly: “When we’re grown-up, I don’t think we’ll all be alive.”

“But you were the one who was supposed to survive, not me, because you were the one who was good at being alone!”

As she slumps down in despair and starts to gather her things together, she has tears in her eyes, and when the man starts to help her, he does too. It takes a special sort of heart to feel like that about someone else’s belongings.

Louisa can’t help thinking that’s a kind thing to do, taking the risk of getting lung cancer out of sheer politeness.

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

The artist didn’t know it then, but that was how he would eventually paint Joar in the picture: his outline blurred, as if you were always on the point of losing him.

How could the sea be big enough to have room for their hearts? Incomprehensible.

Everyone dies, of course, every single person, but very few get to understand that they’re dying.

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

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.

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.

“I’m not your reason, no one is your reason, your art is your own,”

“On my gravestone I want you to put: ‘Enter from other side,’ ” the artist whispers, because he knows jokes like that drive Ted mad. “Be quiet,” Ted mumbles. “Or ‘Here lies a man who ate his vegetables but died anyway,’ ” the artist suggests.

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.

“Write on the gravestone: ‘Does this coffin make me look fat?’ ”

They have never met, but it doesn’t matter. Art teaches us to mourn for strangers.

it’s hard to talk when your lungs and heart are in a little heap on the floor inside you,

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

You don’t wish for happiness when you have lost the love of your life, because you can’t even imagine ever feeling happy again.

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

You do whatever you can to not disappoint a friend after that.

That’s how long it takes to become best friends. A whole lifetime, a single second.

The room was cold and smelled of damp, but for twelve-year-olds, having a space of their own is the height of luxury, a staircase dividing them from the adult world is like a moat around a castle.

It’s hard to say “I love you” when you’re fourteen years old. And completely impossible to dare to whisper: “Don’t hurt yourself, because you’d be hurting me too.”

“Okay…,” he nods in confusion, because the strangest thing that can happen to a middle-aged man in the middle of an argument is for him to suddenly win.

“I’m eighteen. No one’s missing me.”

Ted throws his arms up in a gesture of such resignation that he accidentally hits himself on the back of the head, which is quite a talent, being so clumsy that you’re your own most likely cause of death.

It’s the job of fourteen-year-olds not to be great at things, the only expectation they have to live up to is to be morons, they’re put on this earth so their moms and dads will support the headache-pill industry.

He didn’t know a damn thing about art, his hands just drew for the same reason that some feet dance: they don’t know how to stop.

Art is a moment. Art is being a reason. Art is coping with being alive for one more week.

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

Until then he hadn’t known that grief is physical, an abuse of the living.

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

It’s hard to cope with seeing yourself in someone else.

When you get old, gravity pulls the corners of your mouth down, the road to a smile grows longer.