Top 500 Fredrik Backman Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

104. “Anyone who devotes his life to being the best at one single thing will be asked, sooner or later, the same question: “Why?” Because if you want to become the best at something, you have to sacrifice everything else.”

— Fredrik Backman

105. “The hardest thing about having a family is that you are never finished.”

— Fredrik Backman

106. “Men are what they are because of what they do. Not what they say.”

— Fredrik Backman

107. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

109. “And when enough people are quiet for long enough, a handful of voices can give the impression that everyone is screaming.”

— Fredrik Backman

110. “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

111. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

115. “It’s going to be a grand adventure and a fairy tale of marvels. But it’s my fault that you’ll find a dragon at the end, my darling knight.”

— Fredrik Backman

116. “Did your parents by any chance have the same surname before they met?” Zara asked.”

— Fredrik Backman

117. “The truth. There isn’t any. All we’ve managed to find out about the boundaries of the universe is that it hasn’t got any, and all we know about God is that we don’t know anything. 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. We save those we can.”

— Fredrik Backman

118. “Being married is easy, she usually thinks. You just pick an argument you’re really good at, then repeat it at least once a week for all eternity.”

— Fredrik Backman

119. “She was about to add that Harry Potter was also an orphan, and to be like Harry Potter in any way at all is actually the coolest thing there is, but she’s starting to realize that The Monster probably doesn’t read as much quality literature as one might hope.”

— Fredrik Backman

120. “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

121. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

123. “Hockey is a simple sport: when your desire to win is stronger than your fear of losing, you have a chance. No one wins when they’re frightened.”

— Fredrik Backman

124. “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

125. “She said I’m overprotective. That I’m one of those penguins that squats on top of a stone because I don’t want to accept that the egg has gone. She said you can’t protect your kids from life, because life gets us all in the end.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

127. “He’s the sort of person who runs toward a fire. No hesitation, no questions, he just runs. People like that are rare, but you know who they are when you see them.”

— Fredrik Backman

128. “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

129. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

131. “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

132. “Everyone is a hundred different things, but in other people’s eyes we usually get the chance to be only one of them.”

— Fredrik Backman

133. “Humanity has many shortcomings, but none is stronger than pride.”

— Fredrik Backman

134. “In a long marriage you don’t need words to have a row, but you don’t need words to say ‘I love you’, either.”

— Fredrik Backman

135. “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

136. “There will always be people who won’t understand his decision. Who will call him weak or dishonest or disloyal. They are probably people who live secure lives, who are surrounded by people who share their own opinions and only talk to people who reinforce their own worldview. It’s easy for them to judge him – it’s always easier to lecture other people about morality when you’ve never had to answer for anything yourself.”

— Fredrik Backman

137. “Sometimes it hurts, it really hurts, for no other reason than the fact that our skin doesn’t feel like it’s ours. Sometimes we panic, because the bills need paying and we have to be grown-up and we don’t know how, because it’s so horribly, desperately easy to fail at being grown-up.”

— Fredrik Backman

138. “This story is about a lot of things, but mostly about idiots. So it needs saying from the outset that 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

139. “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

140. “One of the most painful moments in a person’s life probably comes with the insight that an age has been reached when there is more to look back on than ahead.”

— Fredrik Backman

141. “That’s the sort of thing you never really notice until you belong to someone else, the fact that those of us who give children their names are the least willing to use them. We give those we love nicknames, because love requires a word that belongs to us alone.”

— Fredrik Backman

142. “There are few words that are harder to explain than “loyalty.” It’s always regarded as a positive characteristic, because a lot of people would say that many of the best things people do for each other occur precisely because of loyalty. The only problem is that many of the very worst things we do to each other occur because of the same thing.”

— Fredrik Backman

143. “On the biggest day of his life he is the loneliest boy on earth.”

— Fredrik Backman

144. “Where you are born and who you become is a cruel lottery.”

— Fredrik Backman

145. “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

146. “Never again do you find friends like the ones you have when you’re fifteen years old.”

— Fredrik Backman

147. “Life is so damn, damn, damn tough sometimes that it’s almost unbearable. Even if that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

— Fredrik Backman

148. “All the good you do today will be forgotten by others tomorrow. Do good anyway.”

— Fredrik Backman

149. “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

150. “Never trust people who don’t have something in their lives that they love beyond all reason.”

— Fredrik Backman