My Friends Quotes

“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.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“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.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“Art is what we leave of ourselves in other people.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“Nothing weighs more than someone else’s belief in you.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“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.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“... it's a lie that people are scared of being alone, because what we fear is being abandoned. You can choose to be alone, but no one chooses to be left.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“I love you and I believe in you.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“He was good at seeing beauty in everything, that happens if you’re no good at seeing it in yourself.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“The person we fall in love with, we hardly ever call by their name. Because it’s somehow just so obvious that it’s you I’m talking to, that it’s you I’m always thinking of. Who else?”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“Being human is to grieve constantly.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“Being a parent is so strange, all our children's pain belongs to us, but so does their joy.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“That’s the very hardest thing to understand about death: nothing. That the world shrinks without him, because instead of him there is just emptiness. The vibration of his laughter, the smell of his skin, his phone number. How can someone who meant everything to Ted become… nothing at all? It’s the incomprehensibility of death that drives people mad, so that we forget how to breathe and how to walk, until we spend whole nights stumbling about in dark rooms, calling and calling, trying to understand how there can be a phone number that no longer belongs to anyone.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“When you get old, gravity pulls the corners of your mouth down, the road to a smile grows longer.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“Because it’s been a painfully short life, the blink of an eye, a single summer’s day. Ted’s chest hurts, like crying without oxygen, because grief does so many strange things to people, and one of those things is that we forget how to breathe. As if the body’s first instinct is to grieve itself to death. 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.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“The most dangerous place on earth is inside us.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“Louisa is a teenager, the best kind of human. The evidence for this is very simple: little children think teenagers are the best humans, and teenagers think teenagers are the best humans, the only people who don’t think that teenagers are the best humans are adults. Which is obviously because adults are the worst kind of humans.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“He feels like telling her that the artist didn’t give her the painting because it was his inheritance, he gave it to her because he realized that she was the inheritance. Art is what we leave of ourselves in other people. But he doesn’t quite know how to say that.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“Becoming a parent? Someone said it’s an invisible tidal wave that hits you with such force that you lose your breath and never quite get it back. You spend your whole life gasping, someone else said, because it’s a love so immense that it squeezes the air out of your lungs. Everyone else thinks you look like the same person afterward, a third said, but you don’t understand any of it, because there’s such a clear before and after. A completely new you.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“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.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“The artist’s bookcases were full of poets, like the bookcases of anyone trying to find out how everyone else copes.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“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.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“Do you know what the biggest thread to women’s health is?’’
‘’Men,’’ Louisa says, because all women know that.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“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.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“Art teaches us to mourn for strangers.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“Surely taking life for granted is the whole point of being here, because what else are we doing? 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.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“You can’t love someone out of addiction. All the oceans are the tears of those who have tried”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“Grown men don’t have enough things they’re afraid of on this planet to become good at running.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“If there is nothing but what we make in this world, brothers, let us make good.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“Imagination is a child’s only weapon.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends