My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

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.

Becoming a parent? Someone said it’s an invisible tidal wave that hits you with such force that you lose your breath and never quite get it back. You spend your whole life gasping, someone else said, because it’s a love so immense that it squeezes the air out of your lungs. Everyone else thinks you look like the same person afterward, a third said, but you don’t understand any of it, because there’s such a clear before and after. A completely new you.

laughter is a small treasure.

when you’re about to turn fifteen, that’s the age when friendship is like joining the mafia:

That’s all childhood friends are, people stuck on the same island. If you find a single one of them, you can cope with almost anything.

he felt ashamed, as if he had grabbed the wrong coat from a cloakroom and was wearing someone else’s dream.

because grief does so many strange things to people, and one of those things is that we forget how to breathe.

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

A lack of self-confidence is a devastating virus. There’s no cure.

laughter heals all wounds,

we don’t nag anyone the way we nag the people we love. All parents know that, and so do all best friends.

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

Art is what we leave of ourselves in other people.

It’s so strange, he thinks, the way we remember things. What we try to remember and what we fight to forget.

“Because loyalty is a superpower.”

The most dangerous place on earth is inside us.

‘Because I want to know what’s happening inside you! Because you happened to me! You happen to me every second I’m alive!’ ”

Mary Oliver: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

It’s strange what our memories do to us, editing our feelings.

“What I hate most isn’t that people die. What I hate most is that they’re dead. That I’m alive, without them.”

happiness on credit. Her heart paid the debt, with interest.

because they had families, they had inherited a belief that they belonged in every room they walked into.

“There is a time for everything. A time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot. A time to weep and a time to laugh. A time to mourn. A time to dance.”

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.