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

102. “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

103. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

113. “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

114. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

129. “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

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

134. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

136. “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

137. “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

138. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

140. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

143. “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

144. “We can busy ourselves with living or with dying, Ove. We have to move on.” And that’s how it was.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

146. “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

147. “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

148. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman