Top 500 Fredrik Backman Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “Parents are defined by their mistakes.” Do you think this statement is true?”

— Fredrik Backman

452. “And she will never find anything in her life more unfathomable than the fact that the boy she gave birth to in a place that has never seen snow was born to play a sport on ice.”

— Fredrik Backman

453. “Ove feels an instinctive skepticism towards all people taller than six feet; the blood can’t quite make it all the way up to the brain.”

— Fredrik Backman

454. “People of Granny’s age describe Wikipedia as ‘an encyclopaedia, but on the net!’ Encyclopaedias are what Elsa describes as ‘Wikipedia, but analogue.”

— Fredrik Backman

455. “The silence doesn’t bother Amat, who opens the door and turns a corner in the corridor, after which he can only hear a muffled rumble in his ears. She gives him tunnel vision. “Hi, Maya!” he exclaims, a little too loudly. She turns around fleetingly, notes his presence, but nothing more than that. When you’re fifteen years old, no look can hurt you more. “Hi, Amat,” she replies distractedly, and is gone before she even gets to the end of his name.”

— Fredrik Backman

456. “Disappointment with our children is always just disappointment with ourselves, and nothing has a longer braking distance than that.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

458. “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

459. “I buy distance from other people.”

— Fredrik Backman

460. “Everything seems obvious in hindsight!”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

463. “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

464. “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

465. “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

466. “That’s the only thing someone who definitely wants to live and someone who definitely wants to die have in common: if you’re going to jump off something, you need to be pretty damn sure of the height.”

— Fredrik Backman

467. “There are plenty of things that hurt people without people ever really knowing why. Anxiety can act as internal gravity, shrinking the soul.”

— Fredrik Backman

468. “That’s always the way with sons of fathers who liked whisky a little too much: you either drink it all the time or not at all. There’s no in-between in some families.”

— Fredrik Backman

469. “The very worst events in life have that effect on a family: we always remember, more sharply than anything else, the last happy moment before everything fell apart. The second before the crash, the ice-cream at the gas station just before the accident, the last swim on holiday before we came home and received the diagnosis. Our memories always force us back to those very best moments.”

— Fredrik Backman

470. “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

471. “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

472. “All adults have days when we feel completely drained. When we no longer know quite what we spend so much time fighting for, when reality and everyday worries overwhelm us and we wonder how much longer we’re going to be able to carry on. The wonderful thing is that we can all live through far more days like that without breaking than we think. The terrible thing is that we never know exactly how many.”

— Fredrik Backman

473. “We lie to those we love.”

— Fredrik Backman

474. “One of the plainest truths about both towns and individuals is that they usually don’t turn into what we tell them to be, but what they are told they are.”

— Fredrik Backman

475. “You love each other until you can’t live without each other. And even if you stop loving each other for a little while, you can’t... you can’t live without each other.”

— Fredrik Backman

476. “Mom. You taught me that I don’t have to have dreams. I can have goals.”

— Fredrik Backman

477. “And Ove realized that he wanted to hear her talking about the things she loved for the rest of his life.”

— Fredrik Backman

478. “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

479. “We become what we are told we are. Ana has always been told that she’s wrong.”

— Fredrik Backman

480. “They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves.”

— Fredrik Backman

481. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

483. “A lion among bears.”

— Fredrik Backman

484. “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

485. “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

486. “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

487. “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

488. “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

489. “And that laughter of hers, which, for the rest of his life, would make him feel as if someone was running around barefoot on the inside of his breast.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

491. “The end of life is as unstoppable as its beginning, we can’t stop the first and last breaths we take any more than we can stop the wind.”

— Fredrik Backman

492. “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

493. “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

494. “Once her mom slurred in her ear: “Personality is just the sum of our experiences. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. So don’t you worry, my little princess, you won’t get your heart broken because you come from a broken home. You won’t grow up to be a romantic, because children from broken homes don’t believe in everlasting love.”

— Fredrik Backman

495. “The best thing about nature is that it isn’t nostalgic; rocks and trees don’t give a damn about their previous owners.”

— Fredrik Backman

496. “At a certain age almost all the questions a person asks him or herself are really just about one thing: how should you live your life?”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

498. “If you want to know why people sacrifice everything for love, you have to start by asking how they fell in love. Sometimes it doesn’t take anything at all for us to start loving something. Just time.”

— Fredrik Backman

499. “Sometimes two strangers only need one thing in common to find each other sympathetic.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman