Top 500 Fredrik Backman Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “Hockey is just a silly little game. We devote year after year after year to it without ever really hoping to get anything in return. We burn and bleed and cry, fully aware that the most the sport can give us, in the very best scenario, is incomprehensibly meager and worthless: just a few isolated moments of transcendence. That’s all.”

— Fredrik Backman

452. “He’s a team player – that’s how he would describe himself. And the starting point for that is always understanding your own role, and its limitations.”

— Fredrik Backman

453. “The assistant, a young man with a single-digit body mass index, looks ill at ease. He visibly struggles to control his urge to snatch the box out of Ove’s hands.”

— Fredrik Backman

454. “Then Mum died. And Dad grew even quieter. As if she took away with her the few words he’d possessed.”

— Fredrik Backman

455. “You can love something without loving everything about it. You don’t have to feel embarrassed about not being proud. That applies to hockey, but it also applies to friends.”

— Fredrik Backman

456. “All his life Bobo has wanted just one thing to be allowed to belong to something.”

— Fredrik Backman

457. “It’s such a nice brain, Grandpa,” Noah says encouragingly, because Grandma always said that whenever Grandpa goes quiet, you just have to give him a compliment to get him going again. “That’s nice of you.” Grandpa smiles and dries his eyes with the back of his hand. “A bit messy though.” The boy grins. “It rained for a long time here when your Grandma died. I never quite got it back in order after that.”

— Fredrik Backman

458. “Not a second has passed since she had children without her feeling like a bad mother. For everything. For not understanding, for being impatient, for not knowing everything, not making better packed lunches, for still wanting more out of life than just being a mother. She hears other women in Beartown sigh behind her back: “Yes, but she has a full-time job, you know. Can you imagine?” No matter how much you try to let words like that run off you, a few of them stick.”

— Fredrik Backman

459. “It’s so easy to get people to hate one another. That’s what makes love so impossible to understand. Hate is so simple that it always ought to win. It’s an uneven fight.”

— Fredrik Backman

460. “He misses her so much that sometimes he can’t bear existing in his own body.”

— Fredrik Backman

461. “One of all the terrible effects of grief is that we interpret its absence as egotism.”

— Fredrik Backman

462. “When you know someone is keeping secrets from you it makes you feel like an idiot, and no one likes feeling like an idiot. Mum.”

— Fredrik Backman

463. “I’m blunt and sharp and full of black and white. She’s all my colour.”

— Fredrik Backman

464. “They were happy, or at least as happy as a family can be when it’s burdened by a grief too large to be absorbed by time.”

— Fredrik Backman

465. “ZARA: I run a bank.”

— Fredrik Backman

466. “You might be playing with bears. But that doesn’t mean you have to forget that you’re a lion.”

— Fredrik Backman

467. “But she doesn’t want to disappoint him, so she stays quiet. Because you hardly ever disappoint anybody if you just stay quiet.”

— Fredrik Backman

468. “When you’ve been stuck with each other long enough it can seem like there’s no difference between no longer arguing and no longer caring.”

— Fredrik Backman

469. “That’s all this is about. We want you to be better than us. Because if our kids don’t grow up to be better than us, then what’s the point of all this? We want you to be kinder, smarter, more humble, more generous, and more selfless than we are.”

— Fredrik Backman

470. “People who have never been hunted always seem to think there’s a reason for it. ‘They wouldn’t do it without a cause, would they? You must have done something to provoke them.’ As if that was how oppression works.”

— Fredrik Backman

471. “It’s not that he’s the sort of man who gives up and dies; he doesn’t want her to think that. But it’s actually wrong, all this. She married him. And now he doesn’t quite know how to carry on without the tip of her nose in the pit between his throat and his shoulder. That’s all.”

— Fredrik Backman

472. “All your best qualities come from the fact that you’ve been raised in a house full of women.”

— Fredrik Backman

473. “And that was how the people of Miaudacas learned that a queen only stays in power for as long as her subjects are afraid of conflict.”

— Fredrik Backman

474. “Then Grandpa starts to cry, silently and tearlessly, so that his grandson won’t realize.”

— Fredrik Backman

475. “We always remember more sharply than anything else, the last happy moment before everything fell apart.”

— Fredrik Backman

476. “I gave my change to him,” says Parvaneh, with a nod at the man with the dirty beard by the house wall. “You know he’ll only spend it on schnapps,” Ove states. Parvaneh opens her eyes wide with something Ove strongly suspects to be sarcasm. “Really? Will he? And I was sooo hoping he would use it to pay off his student loans from his university education in particle physics!”

— Fredrik Backman

477. “The world never feels bigger than when you’re holding the smallest person.”

— Fredrik Backman

478. “But perhaps, though, you’ve been in love? Almost everyone has, after all. And love can make you do quite a lot of ridiculous things. 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.”

— Fredrik Backman

479. “If a human being closes her eyes hard enough and for long enough, she can remember pretty well everything that has made her happy.”

— Fredrik Backman

480. “She liked talking and Ove liked keeping quiet. Retrospectively, Ove assumed that was what people meant when they said that people were compatible.”

— Fredrik Backman

481. “He never understood why she chose him. She loved abstract things like music and books and strange words. Ove was a man filled entirely with tangible things. He liked screwdrivers and oil filters. He went through life with his hands firmly shoved in his pockets. She danced.”

— Fredrik Backman

482. “I abandoned you, but at least I abandoned you at the top of the hierarchy of needs.”

— Fredrik Backman

483. “It’s difficult to know when love blooms; suddenly one day you wake up and it’s in full flower. It works the same way when it wilts-one day it is just too late. Love has a great deal in common with balcony plants in that way. Sometimes not even baking soda makes a difference.”

— Fredrik Backman

484. “So Britt-Marie stays in there and dries her hair and brings them luck and has a life crisis. It’s possible to do all of these things at the same time.”

— Fredrik Backman

485. “The hunting dogs greet her with cold noses and warm hearts. She does what she has done a thousand times in her childhood when the house stank of alcohol and her parents were screaming at each other. She sleeps with the animals. Because the animals have never done her any harm.”

— Fredrik Backman

486. “Elsa is the sort of child who learned early in life that it’s easier to make your way if you get to choose your own soundtrack.”

— Fredrik Backman

487. “It’s just as easy to be exclusive as it is to be inclusive, just as easy to create an Us as a Them. Benji has never been worried about being beaten up or hated if anyone finds out the truth about him; he’s been hated by every opposing team since he was a child. The only thing he’s scared of is that one day there will be jokes that his teammates and coach won’t tell when he’s in the room. The exclusivity of laughter.”

— Fredrik Backman

488. “If nobody knows who you are, you can be whoever you want to be.”

— Fredrik Backman

489. “There are damn few things in life that are harder than admitting to yourself that you’re a hypocrite.”

— Fredrik Backman

490. “Even astonishingly late in life, people seem incapable of considering that their parents might not be super-smart and really funny and immortal. Perhaps there’s a biological reason for that, that up to a certain age a child loves you unconditionally and hopelessly for one single reason: you’re theirs.”

— Fredrik Backman

491. “Sonja said once that to understand men like Ove and Rune, one had to understand from the very beginning that they were men caught in the wrong time. Men who only required a few simple things from life, she said. A roof over their heads, a quiet street, the right make of car, and a woman to be faithful to. A job where you had a proper function. A house where things broke at regular intervals, so you always had something to tinker with.”

— Fredrik Backman

492. “You never get the same kind of friends again like you have when you’re a teenager. Not even if you keep them your whole life. it will never be the same as it was then.”

— Fredrik Backman

493. “Ana was a tornado. A jagged, hundred-sided peg in a community where everyone was supposed to fit into round holes.”

— Fredrik Backman

494. “Sune and Peter broke away from the search party in the forest because Sune realized they were looking for a hockey player while everyone else thought they were looking for an ordinary boy. They found Kevin out on the lake at dawn, his cheeks touched by frostbite, the look of the bear in his eyes. It was Peter who carried the seven-year-old back home. Sune walked alongside in silence, inhaling deeply through his nostrils. In the depths of winter the town smelled of cherry blossom again.”

— Fredrik Backman

495. “When he left her she wept so hard that she couldn’t breathe. Her body was never really the same after that, she curled up and never quite unfurled again.”

— Fredrik Backman

496. “Do you have any idea how many men have told me that story to illustrate how selfish and untrustworthy ordinary people are? Do you know how many men like you every single woman on the planet meets every day, who think that every thought that pops into your tiny little male brains is a lovely present you can give us?”

— Fredrik Backman

497. “It’s only a game. Everyone who plays it gets told that from time to time. A lot of people try to tell themselves that it’s true, but it’s complete nonsense. No one in this town would have been the same if that game hadn’t existed.”

— Fredrik Backman

498. “The town is breathing deeply around it, still asleep, swaddled in eiderdowns and dreams and tiny feet belonging to hearts our own can’t beat without.”

— Fredrik Backman

499. “A time like that comes for every man, when he chooses what sort of man he wants to be. And if you don’t know the story, you don’t know the man.”

— Fredrik Backman

500. “He has seen good people capable of great evil, but also evil people capable of incredible light. It’s the same everywhere. Almost everybody loves too much, hates too easily, forgives too little. But most people want the same things: to live in peace, to make their hearts beat a little slower when the night comes, to earn some money to support the ones they love.”

— Fredrik Backman