My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

The artist would remember being fourteen as feeling like he was always homesick, because he realized as an adult that that was what the emptiness in his chest was: some of us are born in the wrong place, the whole of our childhood is like being shipwrecked on a desert island, we ache with homesickness without knowing what home is yet. 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.

Soon Ted will stand up and discover that he’s forgotten how to walk too, that happens to us all when the love of our life falls asleep for the last time, because when the soul leaves the body, evidently the last thing it does is tie our shoelaces together. In the weeks following the death we trip over thin air. It’s the soul’s fault.

Art is so big, so unfathomable, that it teaches us to mourn for strangers.

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

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. If

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

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.”

He would never have let anyone say they were bad parents, he understood that it was practically impossible to be a good one, children are so fragile that if you’re the least bit fragile yourself, it’s hopeless right from the start. At least one of you will fall apart.

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.

Grief is a luxury for those living an easier life.

Ted explains that children know hardly anything about their parents, even if they live with them their whole lives. Because all we know about them is as moms and dads, nothing about who they were before that. We never saw them young, when they still fantasized about all the things that could happen, instead of regretting all the things that never did.

Life is long, but it moves at high speed, a single step here or there can be enough to ruin everything.

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.