My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

They’re the sort of guards who have so much muscle that they have muscles that don’t even have Latin names, because back when people spoke Latin, idiots as big as this didn’t even exist yet.

He would often try to think that perhaps that has to be the case: that our teenage years have to simultaneously be the brightest light and the darkest depths, because that’s how we learn to figure out our horizons.

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.

He’s almost forty years old and he’s lived a long life, remarkably long, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar. He has seen the world, fallen in love on white beaches, danced to loud music on warm nights, and wasted slow mornings under soft sheets. He has painted and giggled and sung.

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

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

where a man ended up in prison and was threatened by the other inmates. That was a bad move on their part, because they didn’t know how dangerous the man was until he fixed his eyes on them and said: “None of you understand. I’m not locked up in here with YOU. You’re locked up in here with ME.”

because in the face of death grown men are like children, we think that if we close our eyes, we become invisible.

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.”

I went to art school, but I was lucky, I got thrown out before they had time to teach me anything.” “Why did you get thrown out?” the boy asked. “They didn’t like what I was painting on.” “What were you painting on?” “Drugs.”

the artist’s whole body was shaking so badly that if he had been holding milk, it would have been butter.

It’s a long life, but fast, one single step in the right direction can be enough.

“Damned if I know… I don’t even think all the people who go to church every Sunday believe in God. I think they just need company. To feel that they belong to a group.” Kimkim nodded gently and replied: “But I don’t think that means that God doesn’t exist, Joar. I think maybe that’s what God is.”

“And you don’t know what to do with shitloads of money? Damn, you’re a bad teenager. Buy a sports car! And drugs! Start a zoo! I would have bought a bunch of monkeys. You can’t be in a bad mood if you’ve got a bunch of monkeys. Especially not if you’ve also got drugs.”

“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

“He said that thing that you always said, the thing that painter said. That you should paint like the birds sing. But Kimkim said it was never like that for him. He said he painted the way we laughed.”

“Don’t be ashamed to be a human being—be proud! Inside you one vault after another opens endlessly. You’ll never be complete, and that’s as it should be.”