Top 500 Fredrik Backman Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 3 of 10

101. “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

102. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

105. “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

106. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

108. “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

109. “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

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. “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

112. “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

113. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

115. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

117. “Ove had never been asked how he lived before he met her. But if anyone had asked him, he would have answered that he didn’t.”

— Fredrik Backman

118. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

127. “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

128. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

130. “A parent’s love is unbearable, reckless, irresponsible.”

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

135. “It’s always easier to lecture other people about morality when you’ve never had to answer for anything yourself.”

— Fredrik Backman

136. “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

137. “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

138. “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

139. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

141. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

144. “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

145. “There will be a spring and a summer. It’s almost excruciating. But then comes autumn, short as a wink, before winter is finally upon us again. Life does not go on, it starts again, everything is possible again. Anything can happen, all the best and all the most beautiful and all the greatest adventures on earth.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

147. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

149. “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

150. “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 to do to each other, with each other, for each other.”

— Fredrik Backman