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My Friends

Book by Fredrik Backman · 29 quotes · Life, Love, Children

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My Friends Quotes

“Oh, those are all our very best moments, when we’re wasting our lives. It’s an act of magnificent rebellion to do meaningless things, to waste time, to swim and drink soda and sleep late. To be silly and frivolous, to laugh at stupid little jokes and tell stupid little stories. Or to paint big paintings, the biggest you can manage, and to try to learn to whisper in color. To look for a way to show other people: this was me, these were my humans, these were our farts. These were our bodies, and they were small, far too small, because they couldn’t contain all our love. 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.”

LoveLifeHope
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“There are moments, moments like this, when an abstract longing overcomes me, one made all the more violent by its lack of fixed purpose. The trick time plays is to lull us into the belief that everything lasts forever, and, although nothing does, we continue inside that dream. And, as in a dream, the shape of my days bear no relation to what I had, somehow and without knowing it, allowed myself to expect.”

TimeImpermanence
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“The artist would remember being fourteen as feeling like he was always homesick, because he realized as an adult that that was what the emptiness in his chest was: some of us are born in the wrong place, the whole of our childhood is like being shipwrecked on a dessert island, we ache with homesickness without knowing what home is yet. That's all childhood friends are, people stuck on the same island. If you find a single one of them, you can cope with almost anything.”

LoveLifeFriendship
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“An artist encounters an untranslatable experience and it causes in him such violent wonder and disquiet that he must try, with what will he can, to overcome the gulf, to attempt to reconcile ‘God’ and ‘Nature’ with ‘the single life.’ Here we have two untranslatable experiences. The first is the friendship, which, like all friendships, one cannot fully describe to anyone else. The second is grief, which again, like all forms of grief, is horrible exactly for how uncommunicable it is.”

ArtFriendshipGriefTranslation
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