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My Friends

Book by Fredrik Backman · 4 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.”

“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.”