My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

it. 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.

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.

How can someone who meant everything to Ted become… nothing at all? It’s the incomprehensibility of death that drives people mad, so that we forget how to breathe and how to walk, until we spend whole nights stumbling about in dark rooms, calling and calling, trying to understand how there can be a phone number that no longer belongs to anyone.

Art teaches us to mourn for strangers.

When Louisa gets out of the car, the woman asks if the girl would like her to “call someone?” That is kind of her, to assume Louisa has a someone.

Grief is a selfish bacteria, it demands all our attention.

Joar thought you needed to start if you were ever going to finish, but that wasn’t how it worked. Art isn’t chronological. Everything the artist drew came from a place in his head that he could only get to if he wasn’t looking for it.

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. It really, really isn’t the job of fourteen-year-olds to be geniuses.

When sufficiently wealthy people want something bad enough, it becomes invaluable, because then art isn’t experienced through the eyes, but by the ears, they’re not paying for a picture but for its name and history. In their world it isn’t the artist who should be admired, it’s the owner, because only something which has a price can have any value.

So true! This also resonates with how the wealthy destorying nature which is free and beautiful to create something that can be sold for a price.

He thinks of what Joar used to say: You know you’re old when you have to use soap on your head and shampoo on your ass.

On those evenings, the artist would often sit on the floor drawing birds for her. She was envious of them, not because they flew south for the winter but because they flew back home again in spring, that they were so confident they knew where their home was.

“If that hadn’t happened, the painting would never have been what it was. Art is coincidence,” Ted says.

the memories are coming in fits and starts, like water from a frozen pipe:

“Why would he need me?” Joar turned and said: “Because loyalty is a superpower.”

“Art is coincidence, love is chaos,”

So the moment is ruined. You can always trust reality to do that.

I would have forgotten that he didn’t exist, all the time. I would have gotten angry because the light in the bathroom was turned off, because I used to get so annoyed with him for always leaving it on. I would have saved all his shoes, all his shirts, and I would have been angry with the spring and hated flowers when they appeared because they drowned out the last smells of him. I would have always laid the table for two on the balcony. I would have had to eat all the popcorn myself. I would never have been able to pick a film.”

“You know what Mom always says? 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.”

Great art is a small break from human despair,

“Sandberg once said that art should be without purpose, and irresistible. You have to paint like the birds sing.”

His mom and dad never saw him hunched over his sketch pad with his pen darting across the paper. What a treasure to miss out on. They never understood how special it is to be abnormal.

The most dangerous place on earth is inside us.

And when the playgrounds are empty, when the last pair of rain boots has been grown out of, when the last puddle has been jumped in… What would we want eternity for then, Ted?”

“You’re an artist if you create something! You’re an artist if you don’t see the world the way it is, if you hate white walls! No one else decides what art is, no one can stop you loving whatever you like,

Then he quoted his mom’s favorite poem, by Mary Oliver: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Art is what we leave of ourselves in other people.”

“If I live until I’m eighty, it won’t matter, because this is my now forever.”

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.

Friends were something a man like his big brother simply acquired one day in the schoolyard, without quite knowing how it came about, and then he stuck to them, because in this town boys didn’t survive long if they were alone.

But for Ted it’s impossible to come home now, he realizes, because home was the people.

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?

Absolutely

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

The old harbor district is different now, the town has built luxury apartments there, and 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.