Top 500 Fredrik Backman Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

107. “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

108. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

110. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

112. “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

113. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

115. “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

116. “Lies are simple; truth is difficult.”

— Fredrik Backman

117. “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

118. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

120. “When terrible things happen, most people become waves, but some people become rocks. Waves are tossed back and forth when the wind comes, but the rocks just take a beating, immovable, waiting for the storm to blow over.”

— Fredrik Backman

121. “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

122. “The worst thing a divorce does to a person isn’t that it makes all the time you devoted to the relationship feel wasted, but that it steals all the plans you had for the future.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

125. “You love each other until you can’t live without each other. And even if you stop loving each other for a little while, you can’t... you can’t live without each other.”

— Fredrik Backman

126. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

137. “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

138. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

142. “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

143. “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

144. “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

145. “There were days when Kira thought about giving up and asking for a divorce. But she remembered one of the stupid slogans written on scraps of paper all over Peter’s room when he was growing up: “The only time I’m not moving forward is when I’m taking aim.”

— Fredrik Backman

146. “Us against you.”

— Fredrik Backman

147. “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

148. “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

149. “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

150. “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