Top 500 Fredrik Backman Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “It’s so easy to place your hope in people. To think that the world can change overnight. We demonstrate after an attack, we donate money after a disaster, we lay our hearts bare online. But for every step forward we take, we take an almost equally large step back. Seen over time, every change is so slow that it’s barely visible when it’s happening.”

— Fredrik Backman

452. “Everything seems obvious in hindsight!”

— Fredrik Backman

453. “Men like Ove and Rune were from a generation in which one was what one did, not what one talked about.”

— Fredrik Backman

454. “Do you want to know what you can do for me? Start by hearing me.”

— Fredrik Backman

455. “She was fifteen and had access to the Internet; she already knew that the world is a cruel place if you’re a girl. Her parents couldn’t imagine that this could happen, but Maya simply hadn’t expected it to happen to her.”

— Fredrik Backman

456. “I don’t have the words to describe it, but it was like going on a journey with someone. Where didn’t matter. To outer space. It went on for a long time. I started to fold down the corners of pages when there was a bit I really liked, and he started to write little comments in the margins. Just the odd word. ‘Beautiful.’ ‘True.’ That’s the power of literature, you know, it can act like little love letters between people who can only explain their feelings by pointing at other people’s.”

— Fredrik Backman

457. “David could get into an argument with a door, and Peter was so averse to conflict that he couldn’t even kill time.”

— Fredrik Backman

458. “Sometimes you have to laugh at the crap, that’s how you make it bearable.”

— Fredrik Backman

459. “Even in a town that’s covered with snow three-quarters of the year, it’s unbearably cold standing in the shade of someone who’s a bit more popular than you are.”

— Fredrik Backman

460. “One day he’ll stop adding and subtracting income and expenditures in his head all the time.”

— Fredrik Backman

461. “The most dangerous thing on the ice is being hit when you’re not expecting it. So one of the very first things hockey teaches you is to keep your head up, always. Otherwise – bang.”

— Fredrik Backman

462. “Because it makes him feel part of the team. Because there’s something wonderful about making the same noise as everyone around him.”

— Fredrik Backman

463. “Getting married, for instance. Having children, playing happy families, and having a happy marriage. Or you might think that, anyway. Not happy, perhaps, but plausible. A plausible marriage.”

— Fredrik Backman

464. “We lie to those we love.”

— Fredrik Backman

465. “Death does that to us, it’s like a phone call, you always remember exactly what you should have said the moment you hang up.”

— Fredrik Backman

466. “Our hearts are bars of soap that we keep losing hold of; the moment we relax, they drift off and fall in love and get broken, all in the wink of an eye. We’re not in control.”

— Fredrik Backman

467. “It’s too painful to us to admit that our children won’t wait to grow up because their parents are busy with other things...”

— Fredrik Backman

468. “If you had to try things out and read things and find out the truth about things, then you’d never have time to have an opinion about anything.”

— Fredrik Backman

469. “Nine lives won’t last you very long, will they?’ says Ove. The cat licks its paw and looks as if it’s not the sort of cat that likes to keep count.”

— Fredrik Backman

470. “That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.”

— Fredrik Backman

471. “A lion among bears.”

— Fredrik Backman

472. “When his daughter was a teenager, Jim used to think that children were like kites, so he held on to the string as tightly as he could, but eventually the wind carried her off anyway.”

— Fredrik Backman

473. “There’s a constant threat of violence hidden just beneath the surface of a certain type of person in this town that Peter never noticed when he was growing up, but which struck him all the more plainly after he came home from Canada.”

— Fredrik Backman

474. “This is a story about a bank robbery, an apartment viewing, and a hostage drama. But even more it’s a story about idiots. But perhaps not only that.”

— Fredrik Backman

475. “We can’t change the world and a lot of time we can’t even change people... So we do what we can to help whenever we get the chance. We save those we can.”

— Fredrik Backman

476. “Maybe he didn’t write her poems or serenade her with songs or come home with expensive gifts. But no other boy had gone the wrong way on the train for hours every day just because he liked sitting next to her while she spoke.”

— Fredrik Backman

477. “You don’t have to like all children. Just one. And children don’t need the world’s best parents, just their own parents. To be perfectly honest with you, what they need most of the time is a chauffeur.”

— Fredrik Backman

478. “The balcony boxes may look as if they only contain soil, but underneath there are flowers waiting for spring. The winter requires whoever is doing the watering to have a bit of faith, in order to believe that what looks empty has every potential. Britt-Marie no longer knows whether she has faith or just hope. Maybe neither.”

— Fredrik Backman

479. “But if there’s one thing modern life and the Internet have taught us, it’s that you should never expect to win a discussion simply because you’re right.”

— Fredrik Backman

480. “There’s a label she used to love but which she loathes when it’s pronounced in a Beartown accent: “career woman.” Peter’s friends call her that, some in admiration and some with distaste, but no one calls Peter a “career man.” It strikes a nerve because Kira recognizes that insinuation: you have a “job” so you can provide for your family, whereas a “career” is selfish. You have one of those for your own sake.”

— Fredrik Backman

481. “God took a child from me, darling Ove. But he gave me a thousand others.”

— Fredrik Backman

482. “I’ve done what I can to teach you to never feel threatened by strong women. I married the strongest one I’ve ever met.”

— Fredrik Backman

483. “Falling in love with a place and falling in love with a person are related adventures. At first we run around street corners giggling and explore every inch of each other’s skin, over the years we get to know every cobblestone and strand of hair and snore, and the waters of time soften our passion into unfailing love, and in the end the eyes we wake up next to and the horizon outside our window are the same thing: home.”

— Fredrik Backman

484. “Elsa thinks about how Granny used to say, ‘You have standards and I have double standards, and so I win.”

— Fredrik Backman

485. “Do you know what the worst thing about being a parent is? That you’re always judged by your worst moments. You can do a million things right, but if you do one single thing wrong you’re forever that parent who was checking his phone in the park when your child was hit in the head by a swing. We don’t take our.”

— Fredrik Backman

486. “There’s something special about a grandmother’s house. You never forget how it smells.”

— Fredrik Backman

487. “It’s the same everywhere: almost everyone loves too much, hates too easily, forgives too little. But most people want the same as him: to live in peace, to let your heart beat a little more slowly when night comes, to earn a bit of money to support the ones you love.”

— Fredrik Backman

488. “Maya goes into the bathroom and looks at herself in the mirror. Astonished at how strong she has learned to pretend to be. At the number of secrets she can hold.”

— Fredrik Backman

489. “It took chaos to set him free, loneliness to stop him being alone.”

— Fredrik Backman

490. “When you’re a child you long to be an adult and decide everything for yourself, but when you’re an adult you realize that’s the worst part of it. That you have to have opinions all the time, you have to decide which party to vote for and what wallpaper you like and what your sexual preferences are and which flavour yoghurt best reflects your personality. You have to make choices and be chosen by others, every second, the whole time.”

— Fredrik Backman

491. “It’s when two idiots are sitting on a creaking tree branch, and the one closest to the trunk is holding the saw.”

— Fredrik Backman

492. “Guilt is always stronger than logic.”

— Fredrik Backman

493. “Happiness is based on expectations, and we have the Internet now. A whole world constantly asking us: “But is your life as perfect as this? Well? How about now? Is it as perfect as this?”

— Fredrik Backman

494. “Sometimes people have to be allowed to have something to live for in order to survive everything else.”

— Fredrik Backman

495. “David doesn’t even know what “enjoyable hockey” is, he only knows one sort of hockey that isn’t enjoyable – the one where the opposing team scores more points.”

— Fredrik Backman

496. “All marriages have their bad sides, because people have weaknesses. If you live with another human being you learn to handle these weaknesses in a variety of ways. For instance, you might take the view that weaknesses are a bit like heavy pieces of furniture, and based on this you must learn to clean around them. To maintain the illusion.”

— Fredrik Backman

497. “Two people who have loved each for long enough eventually seem to stop touching each other consciously, it becomes something instinctive; when they meet between the hall and kitchen, their bodies somehow find each other. When they walk through a door, her hand ends up in his as if by accident. Tiny collisions, every day, all the time. Impossible to construct. So when they disappear, no one knows why, but suddenly two people are living parallel lives instead of together.”

— Fredrik Backman

498. “Lies are simple; truth is difficult.”

— Fredrik Backman

499. “She always looks a little like she just popped the wrong chocolate into her mouth.”

— Fredrik Backman

500. “Never let the terms of masculinity be dictated by someone who thinks it’s bound up with sexuality. If you really want to know something about what it means to be a man, just ask Gareth Thomas, who stood up in a locker room and told his teammates on the Welsh national rugby team that he was gay. I might not know much about much in this world, but I know for damn sure that no one in that locker room was more of a man at that moment than he was.”

— Fredrik Backman