Top 500 Fredrik Backman Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “And if you don’t know the story, you don’t know the man.”

— Fredrik Backman

102. “So the only thing a mom who was a priest demanded of her family was simple: that we do our best. We plant an apple tree today, even if we know the world is going to be destroyed tomorrow.”

— Fredrik Backman

103. “Those who hasten to live are in a hurry to miss,” she sometimes used to whisper to Noah, though he didn’t know what she meant before she was buried.”

— Fredrik Backman

104. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

106. “Pride in a team can come from a variety of causes. Pride in a place, or a community, or just a single person, We devote ourselves to sports because they remind us of how small we are just as much as they make us bigger.”

— Fredrik Backman

107. “Not knowing is a good place to start.”

— Fredrik Backman

108. “Ove gives the box a skeptical glance, as if it’s a highly dubious sort of box, a box that rides a scooter and wears tracksuit pants and just called Ove “my friend” before offering to sell him a watch.”

— Fredrik Backman

109. “Winners always get the last shot right.”

— Fredrik Backman

110. “She was just one person out of several billion, and most people never become individuals to us. They’re just people. We’re just strangers passing each other, your anxieties briefly brushing against mine as the fibers of our coats touch momentarily on a crowded sidewalk somewhere. We never really know what we do to each other, with each other, for each other.”

— Fredrik Backman

111. “She’s seven years older than him, and with that age gap you don’t have a big sister when you’re little, you have an idol.”

— Fredrik Backman

112. “You don’t have to prove anything to Anna-Lena. You don’t have to prove anything to anyone anymore. You’re good enough.”

— Fredrik Backman

113. “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.”

— Fredrik Backman

114. “Alain Ovich is dead, and Kevin Erdahl may as well be. Benji is a man who loves men, and he loses everyone he loves. It’s hard to have more chaos in oneself than that.”

— Fredrik Backman

115. “Because in the end that’s all anyone can ask of another person. That we are prepared to admit that we don’t know everything.”

— Fredrik Backman

116. “Soon they’ll be grown-up. Mothers have no armor to get them through life because they give every last bit to their children, by the end of their teenage years there isn’t even any skin left, so every feeling of loss cuts right into her flesh now.”

— Fredrik Backman

117. “I just wanted to know what it felt like to be someone you look at.”

— Fredrik Backman

118. “It’s a big universe to be angry at but a long life to have company in.”

— Fredrik Backman

119. “It’s an awful thing to miss someone who’s still here.”

— Fredrik Backman

120. “You’re never quite alone when you can stand on a balcony – you have all the cars and houses and the people in the streets. You’re among them, but also not. That’s the best thing about balconies.”

— Fredrik Backman

121. “Because without music there can’t be any dreams, and without dreams there can’t be any fairy tales, and without fairy tales there can’t be any courage, and without courage no one would be able to bear any sorrows, and.”

— Fredrik Backman

122. “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

123. “One of all the terrible effects of grief is that we interpret its absence as egotism. It’s impossible to explain what you have to do in order to carry on after a funeral, how to put the pieces of a family back together again, how to live with the jagged edges. So what do you end up asking for? You ask for a good day. One single good day. A few hours of amnesia.”

— Fredrik Backman

124. “All the way from locker room to boardroom, the boys and men of Beartown Ice Hockey Club are brought together by a single motto: “High ceilings and thick walls.”

— Fredrik Backman

125. “People driving through say that Beartown doesn’t live for anything but hockey, and some days they may be right. Sometimes people have to be allowed to have something to live for in order to survive everything else.”

— Fredrik Backman

126. “And she was colour. All the colour he had.”

— Fredrik Backman

127. “There’s an old joke among the women of Beartown: “I just wish my husband would look at me the way he watches hockey.”

— Fredrik Backman

128. “Happy people don’t create anything, their world is one without art and music and skyscrapers, without discoveries and innovations. All leaders, all of your heroes, they’ve been obsessed. Happy people don’t get obsessed, they don’t devote their lives to curing illnesses or making planes take off. The happy leave nothing behind. They live for the sake of living, they’re only on earth as consumers. Not me.”

— Fredrik Backman

129. “For more than half a century they belonged to one another. She detested the same characteristics in him that last day as she had the first time she saw him under that tree, and still adored all the others.”

— Fredrik Backman

130. “Winners have a tendency to be forgiven in this town.”

— Fredrik Backman

131. “We aren’t freshly blooming flowers, we’re two trees with intertwined roots, you’ve grown old within me.”

— Fredrik Backman

132. “Granny is seventy-seven years old, going on seventy-eight. She’s not very good at it either. You can tell she’s old because her face looks like newspaper stuffed into wet shoes, but no one ever accuses Granny of being grown-up for her age. “Perky,” people sometimes say to Elsa’s mum, looking either fairly worried or fairly angry as Mum sighs and asks how much she owes for the damages.”

— Fredrik Backman

133. “They’ve always known that Beartown isn’t an easy place to grow up in if you’re different, and one of the worst things about becoming an adult is starting to realize that perhaps nowhere is. There are bastards everywhere.”

— Fredrik Backman

134. “Sports are only sports until someone who doesn’t give a damn about sports has something to gain from them; then sports suddenly become economics.”

— Fredrik Backman

135. “Amat knows his options are limited, so his plan is simple: from here to the junior team, then the A-team, then professional. When his first wages reach his account he’ll grab that cleaning cart from his mother and never let her see it again. He’ll allow her aching fingers to rest and give her aching back a break. He doesn’t want possessions. He just wants to lie in bed one single night without having to count.”

— Fredrik Backman

136. “Sports creates complicated men, proud enough to refuse to admit their mistakes, but humble enough always to put their team first.”

— Fredrik Backman

137. “In ten years’ time two of them will be playing professionally. One will be a dad. One will be dead.”

— Fredrik Backman

138. “Hockey is a sport that rewards repetition. The same exercises, the same movements, until a player’s responses become instinctive, branded into his marrow. The puck doesn’t just glide, it bounces as well, so acceleration is more important than maximum speed, hand-eye coordination more important than strength. The ice judges you by your ability to change direction and thought quicker than anyone else – that’s what separates the best players from the rest.”

— Fredrik Backman

139. “The easiest way to unite a group isn’t through love, because love is hard. It makes demands. Hate is simple.”

— Fredrik Backman

140. “Idiots can’t understand that non-idiots are done with a thought and already moving on to the next before they themselves have.”

— Fredrik Backman

141. “Because you’ve probably been depressed yourself, you’ve had days when you’ve been in terrible pain in places that don’t show up in X-rays, when you can’t find the words to explain it even to the people who love you. Deep down, in memories that we might prefer to suppress even from ourselves, a lot of us know that the difference between us and that man on the bridge is smaller than we might wish.”

— Fredrik Backman

142. “It was a day completely devoid of weather. During some weeks in winter in the central part of Scandinavia the sky doesn’t seem to bother even attempting to impress us, it greets us with the color of newspaper in a puddle, and dawn leaves behind it a fog as if someone has been setting fire to ghosts.”

— Fredrik Backman

143. “The only thing the sport gives us are moments.”

— Fredrik Backman

144. “He was my echo. Everything I do is quieter now,” she said to the other women in the closet.”

— Fredrik Backman

145. “Ove, only a swine thinks size and strength are the same thing. Remember that.” And Ove never forgot it.”

— Fredrik Backman

146. “What is life, other than moments? What is laughter, other than a small victory over sorrow? A single moment, just one, when everything inside us isn’t broken.”

— Fredrik Backman

147. “Het gecompliceerde aan goede en slechte mensen is dat de meesten van ons beide tegelijk kunnen zijn.”

— Fredrik Backman

148. “People in the real world always say, when something terrible happens, that the sadness and loss and aching pain of the heart will “lessen as time passes,” but it isn’t true. Sorrow and loss are constant, but if we all had to go through our whole lives carrying them the whole time, we wouldn’t be able to stand it. The sadness would paralyze us. So in the end we just pack it into bags and find somewhere to leave it.”

— Fredrik Backman

149. “If you can do something for someone in such a way that they think they managed it all on their own, then you’ve done a good job.”

— Fredrik Backman

150. “Nothing is easier for people who never do anything themselves than to criticize someone who actually makes an effort.”

— Fredrik Backman