My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

Grown men don’t have enough things they’re afraid of on this planet to become good at running.

that’s the age when friendship is like joining the mafia: you can’t leave it, you know too much.

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.

Don’t forget that when all the other bastards out there know who you are—we knew you were world-famous first!”

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.

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.

“Being human is to grieve, constantly.”

If you have loved anyone as much as Ted loves the artist, so much that you’re prepared to be mistaken for someone else just to see your friend’s face light up for a couple of seconds, then you know what he feels. Otherwise there’s probably no way to explain.

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

Ted wondered if perhaps that was why it took the artist such a long time to paint the picture of them by the sea: he didn’t have all the colors he needed to paint Joar’s body.

The fact that Joar was capable of loving anyone at all after that was incredible. That he could love anyone the way he loved the artist? A miracle.

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.

“Meet” is probably the wrong word, no one met Joar, because you don’t “meet” a natural disaster, you get hit by it.

his hands just drew for the same reason that some feet dance: they don’t know how to stop.

Angry at himself, angry at the artist, and most of all angry at death for having such good taste. Always taking the best first.

“Yes,” Ted says, almost caressing the air above the picture. “He said he was all the rest of it, everything around us, the water and the air.” “He was the light,” Louisa whispers.

love would be the death of him one day.

‘I wear a mask. And that mask, it’s not to hide who I am, but to create who I am.’ ”

that’s the worst thing about being a parent: that almost everyone does their best, but almost all fail regardless.

“But I don’t think the most important thing for an artist is being able to draw, but having something to say,”

the boy asked with an envy that you have to have grown up in a home full of blank walls to understand.

You’re not giving us enough oxygen, we’re suffocating without your laughter.

Become whatever you want, but don’t become one of them.

“That’s because you don’t paint things the way they look, you paint them the way they feel,”

she painted flowers so they wouldn’t die.

that art was never finished, only abandoned.

“I believed in God when I saw him paint,”

loneliness was better than disappointment.

Grief is a luxury for those living an easier life.

You must live with each other, not only alongside each other.”

They were like two colors. Once they were mixed together, there was no way of separating them.”

And there they were. Three teenagers on a pier by the sea, almost hidden in all the blue, so if the picture had been hanging on a white wall in an exclusive art auction, rich adults would have been able to walk right past without seeing them. But now they were alive forever: Joar, Ali, Ted.