Top 500 Fredrik Backman Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “It’s always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is.”

— Fredrik Backman

52. “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

53. “No one tells you before you procreate that the hardest thing about being a good parent is that you never feel like one. If you’re absent you’re committing one big mistake, but if you’re present the whole time you commit a million tiny ones, and teenagers keep a count. Oh, how they keep a count.”

— Fredrik Backman

54. “If you can’t depend on someone being on time, you shouldn’t trust them with anything more important either.”

— Fredrik Backman

55. “One of the first things you learn as a leader, whether you choose the position of have it forced upon you, is that leadership is as much about what you don’t say as what you do say.”

— Fredrik Backman

56. “Culture” is an odd word to use about hockey; everyone says it, but no one can explain what it means. All organizations like to boast that they’re building a culture, but when it comes down to it everyone really only cares about one sort: the culture of winning.”

— Fredrik Backman

57. “That’s the problem with dreams: you can get to the top of the mountain and discover that you’re scared of heights.”

— Fredrik Backman

58. “I was born here but I’ve never gotten used to it; Helsingborg and I will never find peace. Maybe everyone feels that way about their hometown: the place we’re from never apologizes, never admits that it was wrong about us. It just sits there, at the end of the motorway, whispering: “You might be all rich and powerful now. And maybe you do come home with expensive watches and fancy clothes. But you can’t fool me, because I know who you really are. You’re just a scared little boy.”

— Fredrik Backman

59. “Because if you want to become the best at something, you have to sacrifice everything else.”

— Fredrik Backman

60. “What feels comfortable for the parents isn’t what’s best for the child...”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

62. “Do you remember what you always said when we went fishing on the island and slept in the tent? There’s nothing wrong with being a bit scared, you said, because if you wet yourself it’ll keep the bears away!”

— Fredrik Backman

63. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

66. “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

67. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

69. “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

70. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

75. “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

76. “Love is wanting you to exist.”

— Fredrik Backman

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

82. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

91. “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

92. “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

93. “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

94. “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

95. “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

96. “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

97. “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

98. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman