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.

Because in an ugly place, he was born with so much beauty inside him that it was like an act of rebellion. In a world full of sledgehammers, his art was a declaration of war.

“Do you think we’ll all still be best friends when we’re grown-up?” Joar replied calmly: “When we’re grown-up, I don’t think we’ll all be alive.” Not to brag, but he was right about that too.

“Life is long, Louisa. Everyone will tell you that it’s short, but they’re lying. It’s a long, long life.”

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.

in grief we are reminded that we’re human beings. In life we might be enemies, but when faced with death, we see the truth: we are one species, all we have is each other, and where you go, I shall follow.

Adults often think that self-confidence is something a child learns, but little kids are by their nature always invincible, it’s self-doubt that needs to be taught.

But how do I explain that I’m freezing to death if I’m not seen by you?

There’s a poem by Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day,” which ends with the lines: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

“Art is coincidence, love is chaos,”

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.”

The most dangerous place on earth is inside us.

“Fish said she’d read in a book that in Heaven you could choose a moment in life when you felt really good, and then you got to feel like that for all eternity. She said it didn’t matter if we lived to be eighty years old, because that’s only a billion different nows, and one really good now is enough.”

he and Mom weren’t like two magnets. They were like two colors. Once they were mixed together, there was no way of separating them.”

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

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.