Top 500 Fredrik Backman Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “When Granny was headed for some far-off place, you could only be sure of one thing: that it was a place everyone else was trying to get away from. And if anyone asked her why she was doing it, she’d answer, “I’m a doctor, for God’s sake, and ever since I became one I’ve not allowed myself the luxury of choosing whose life I should be saving.”

— Fredrik Backman

52. “All that awaited her were a thousand sunrises where life is a beautiful prison.”

— Fredrik Backman

53. “This hurts too much to touch with words.”

— Fredrik Backman

54. “We give those we love nicknames, because love requires a word that belongs to us alone.”

— Fredrik Backman

55. “Everyone has a thousand wishes before a tragedy, but just one afterward. When a child is born, its parents dream of it being as unique as possible, until it gets ill, when suddenly all they want is for everything to be normal.”

— Fredrik Backman

56. “One of the last times she met her neighbor in the elevator he gave her a very thick book, written by a man. He had underlined one sentence, several hundred pages in: We are asleep until we fall in love. Estelle gave him a book in exchange, one written by a woman, so it didn’t need hundreds of pages to say things. Close to the start Estelle had underlined: Love is wanting you to exist.”

— Fredrik Backman

57. “This hurts too much to touch with words. It was the man at the undertakers’ who showed the quotation to the Ovich sisters. “My favorite poet, Bodil Malmsten,” the man said, a little embarrassed at his own declaration of love. Now she’s the Ovich sisters’ favorite poet too.”

— Fredrik Backman

58. “If your head isn’t up to the job, your legs better be.”

— Fredrik Backman

59. “Nothing must happen to you No, what am I saying Everything must happen to you And it must be wonderful Julia will give Estelle a completely.”

— Fredrik Backman

60. “The only time I’m not moving forward is when I’m taking aim.”

— Fredrik Backman

61. “I know I drive you crazy, but I’m crazy about you.”

— Fredrik Backman

62. “The best friends of our childhoods are the loves of our lives, and they break our hearts in worse ways.”

— Fredrik Backman

63. “The most expensive thing you can buy in the most densely populated places on the planet is distance.”

— Fredrik Backman

64. “In Beartown silence always goes hand in hand with shame.”

— Fredrik Backman

65. “All children are victims of their parents’ childhoods, because all adults try to give their kids what they themselves enjoyed or lacked. In the end everything is either a revolt against the adults we encountered or an attempt to copy them.”

— Fredrik Backman

66. “Expensive restaurants have bigger gaps between the tables. First class on airplanes has no middle seats. Exclusive hotels have separate entrances for guests staying in suites. The most expensive thing you can buy in the most densely populated places on the planet is distance.”

— Fredrik Backman

67. “Marriage? There ought to be a different word for it after a while. Because there’s no such thing as “eternal infatuation,” only love lasts that long, and it’s never simple. It requires a whole person, everything you have. The whole lot.”

— Fredrik Backman

68. “Even if Kevin is no longer in Beartown, they still have to reclaim the things he stole. Twilight. Solitude. The courage to wear earbuds when it’s dark, the freedom to not look over your shoulder the whole time.”

— Fredrik Backman

69. “The only thing the sport gives us are moments. But what the hell is life, Peter, apart from moments?”

— Fredrik Backman

70. “Our children never warn us that they’re thinking of growing up, one day they’re just too big to want to hold our hand, it’s just as well we never know when the last time is going to be or we’d never let go.”

— Fredrik Backman

71. “The mightiest power of death is not that it can make people die, but that it can make the people you left behind want to stop living.”

— Fredrik Backman

72. “Love is wanting you to exist.”

— Fredrik Backman

73. “You can force people to obey you, but you can never force them to follow you. If you want them to play for you, they have to love you.”

— Fredrik Backman

74. “Very few people have that effect. Very few people are tequila and champagne at the same time.”

— Fredrik Backman

75. “Thanks for that, you’re a real tonic. You’re like a self-help book, only in reverse.”

— Fredrik Backman

76. “Do you know what the worst thing about being a parent is? That you’re always judged by your worst moments... No one goes to see a psychologist to talk about all the times they weren’t hit in the head by a swing as a child. Parents are defined by their mistakes.”

— Fredrik Backman

77. “We love winners, even though they’re very rarely particularly likeable people. They’re almost always obsessive and selfish and inconsiderate. That doesn’t matter. We forgive them. We like them while they’re winning.”

— Fredrik Backman

78. “I just want you to know that I love you. Once you’re older, you’ll realize that I made an endless line of mistakes during your childhood. I know that. I’ve resigned myself to it. But I just want you to know that I did my very, very best. I left it all on the field. I gave this every ounce of everything I had. I.”

— Fredrik Backman

79. “I know that the way home is getting longer and longer every morning. But I loved you because your brain, your world, was always bigger than everyone else’s. There’s still a lot of it left.”

— Fredrik Backman

80. “The hardest thing about death is the grammar, the tense, the fact that she won’t be angry when she sees that he’s bought a new sofa without consulting her first. She won’t be anything. She isn’t on her way home. She was.”

— Fredrik Backman

81. “Sometimes life doesn’t let you choose your battles. Just the company you keep.”

— Fredrik Backman

82. “Ove had never been asked how he lived before he met her. But if anyone had asked him, he would have answered that he didn’t.”

— Fredrik Backman

83. “But sometimes that’s what it takes, a culture of silence to foster a culture of winning.”

— Fredrik Backman

84. “Since his father’s death he had begun more and more to differentiate between people who did what they should, and those who didn’t. People who did and people who just talked. Ove talked less and less and did more and more.”

— Fredrik Backman

85. “Death’s greatest power is not that it can make people die, but that it can make people want to stop living.”

— Fredrik Backman

86. “Death is a strange thing. People live their whole lives as if it does not exist, and yet it’s often one of the great motivations for living. Some of us, in time, become so conscious of it that we live harder, more obstinately, with more fury.”

— Fredrik Backman

87. “Friendship is both complicated and not complicated at all.”

— Fredrik Backman

88. “You get success by having extremely high integrity but absolutely zero prestige. Because integrity is about who you are, whereas prestige is only about what other people think of you.”

— Fredrik Backman

89. “It is difficult to admit that one is wrong. Particularly when one has been wrong for a very long time.”

— Fredrik Backman

90. “It’s hard to care about people. Exhausting, in fact, because empathy is a complicated thing. It requires us to accept that everyone else’s lives are also going on the whole time. We have no pause button for when everything gets too much for us to deal with, but then neither does anyone else.”

— Fredrik Backman

91. “I believe the one that says that if you do it for long enough, it can become impossible to tell the difference between flying and falling.”

— Fredrik Backman

92. “Because of course it was only a dog. It’s so hard to explain that it’s more than an animal when you’re that animal’s human. Perhaps it takes more empathy than most people are capable of. Or more imagination.”

— Fredrik Backman

93. “And if you don’t know the story, you don’t know the man.”

— Fredrik Backman

94. “One day you will be one of the people who lived long ago,” it says.”

— Fredrik Backman

95. “Sometimes it hurts, it really hurts, for no other reason than the fact that our skin doesn’t feel like it’s ours.”

— Fredrik Backman

96. “If you are honest, people may deceive you. Be honest anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfishness. Be kind anyway. All the good you do today will be forgotten by others tomorrow. Do good anyway. What you create, others can destroy. Create anyway. Because in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and anyone else anyway.”

— Fredrik Backman

97. “What is a community? It is the sum total of our choices.”

— Fredrik Backman

98. “When people don’t talk so much they don’t dish out the crap either.”

— Fredrik Backman

99. “Ove has probably known all along what he has to do, but all people at root are time optimists. We always think there’s enough time to do things with other people. Time to say things to them. And then something happens and then we stand there holding on to words like “if.”

— Fredrik Backman

100. “I didn’t say that money was happiness. I said happiness is like money. A made-up value that represents something we can’t weigh or measure.”

— Fredrik Backman