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.

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

“I’m not your reason, no one is your reason, your art is your own,” the artist protests gently.

“Maybe Joar was bigger in the painting because that’s how you saw him. Fish felt big to me, even though I was much taller. People think it’s bad if someone makes you feel small, but it really isn’t.”

“In that case, I’m no longer homeless! Because when rich people sleep outdoors, it isn’t homelessness, it’s camping!”

Art is what we leave of ourselves in other people.”

Agree

“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.”

“If I live until I’m eighty, it won’t matter, because this is my now forever.”

You can choose to be alone, but no one chooses to be left.

Sometimes he imagines that mankind invented God just to have someone to be angry with, because you can’t be angry with a dad who’s dead, not even a little bit.

Ted has never carried a heavier guilt, because it’s himself he’s looking at then, every time his mom raised her voice. 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.

“It isn’t like it is in movies, Ted. It’s different in real life. But Dad once told me, when he was really fucking drunk, that 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.”

“The biggest threat to men’s health, statistically, is heart disease,” Ted says thoughtfully at the kitchen table. “Do you know what the biggest threat to women’s health is?” “Men,” Louisa says, because all women know that.

“The main character and the hero. They aren’t the same thing.”

Children aren’t responsible for their parents’ happiness, but they still try.

“Can I ask something?” Louisa asks, then asks immediately: “How do you cope with death?” It’s Christian’s mother who answers: “It’s art that helps me cope. Because art is a fragile magic, just like love, and that’s humanity’s only defense against death. That we create and paint and dance and fall in love, that’s our rebellion against eternity. Everything beautiful is a shield. Vincent van Gogh wrote: ‘I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.’ ” “It’s cool that we happened at all,” Louisa whispers. “Something like that,” the mother smiles.