My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

“Don’t run. When you want to disappear, you walk, like you’re just going to the bathroom!”

“Look at the sun, do you get how crazy it is that it rises every morning?

The curse is the same for everyone who has loved someone who died of an overdose: we think that if we could just have been with our human every moment of every day, then it would never have happened. It never stops being our fault.

“I don’t want you to see the worst of me, Giant. I just want to be the best version of myself in your brain.”

The brain does a lot of stupid things when it’s stressed. It won’t cooperate at all.

You can choose to be alone, but no one chooses to be left.

People who have never been beaten up don’t understand the recklessness demanded of the person doing the beating, what must be missing from someone like that, or what happens inside the person getting beaten.

The most dangerous creature on the planet is, and has always been, a young man.

You couldn’t possibly love anyone more when you’re fourteen years old.

“The dinosaurs died out, but you and I and all these idiots managed to survive? We do nothing but try to find ways to destroy everything

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

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.

a library. You don’t have to put up with reality there. It’s as if thousands of strangers have given away their imaginary friends, they’re sitting on the shelves and calling to you as you walk past. There’s an author called Donna Tartt who describes why a person falls in love with art: ‘It’s a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes, you.’ That’s what libraries feel like for me.”

It’s difficult being a human being. I think my mom was very like me at first, because she was a romantic when she was young. But there’s no harder person on the planet than a romantic with a broken heart.”

“She’s just tired, Ted. Everyone has had a day when they’re so exhausted that they can hardly think, but she’s been having that same damn day for the past ten years now. That’s hard. She’s done her best. She tried to make you and me tough, because soft people don’t survive in this town.

Stories are complicated, memories are merciless, our brains only store a few moments from the best days of our lives, but we remember every second of the worst.

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

“If you go to university and become a teacher, I could imagine having kids. Because then my kids would have someone to look up to.”

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.

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?

“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 can’t be in a bad mood if you’ve got a bunch of monkeys.

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

“No, thank goodness, you haven’t had any training! No one who’s had any training paints like that! Art doesn’t require training, dear child, art just needs friends.”

That’s the worst thing about death, that it happens over and over again. That the human body can cry forever.

“How do you cope with death?” It’s Christian’s mother who answers: “It’s art that helps me cope. Because art is a fragile magic, just like love, and that’s humanity’s only defense against death. That we create and paint and dance and fall in love, that’s our rebellion against eternity. Everything beautiful is a shield. Vincent van Gogh wrote: ‘I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.’ ”

“It’s hard to be an adult,” Ted says. “It’s hard to be a child too,” Louisa points out.

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. Maybe you’ll understand that when you get older.”

He said he painted the way we laughed.”

Some works of art shouldn’t be owned by anyone. They should belong to everyone.”