Top 500 Fredrik Backman Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “What an uncomfortable, terrible source of shame it is for the world that the victim is so often the one left with the most empathy for others. There will be days when Maya is asked if she really understood the consequences, and she will nod yes, and of all the feelings inside her then, guilt will be the greatest. Because of the unimaginable cruelty she showed toward the people who loved her the most.”

— Fredrik Backman

153. “The only thing of value on Earth is time. One second will always be a second, there’s no negotiating with that.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

155. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

157. “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

158. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

160. “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

161. “Elisabeth Zackell may have been right when she said that anyone who feels responsibility isn’t free. Because responsibility is a burden. Freedom is a pleasure.”

— Fredrik Backman

162. “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

163. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

165. “A time comes in every man’s life when he decides what sort of man he is going to be.”

— Fredrik Backman

166. “No one ever said life was going to be easy.” Being a parent makes you feel like a blanket that’s always too small. No matter how hard you try to cover everyone, there’s always someone who’s freezing.”

— Fredrik Backman

167. “Memory loss is one of the finest things sports can give us.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

169. “I’m constantly reading a book with a missing page, and it’s always the most important one.”

— Fredrik Backman

170. “You never say good-bye in the Land-of-Almost-Awake. You just say “see you later”. It’s important to people in the Land-of-Almost-Awake that it should be this way, because they believe that nothing really ever completely dies. It just turns into a story, undergoes a little shift in grammar, changes tense from “now” to “then”.”

— Fredrik Backman

171. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

173. “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

174. “The only reliable thing about Benji has always been that he’s unreliable. But to everyone’s surprise, nature managed to get through to him where people failed. When someone learns to be in the forest as a child, it’s like gaining an extra language. The air talks here, and Benji understands. It’s mournful and wild.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

176. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

178. “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

179. “And there are no winners without losers, no stars are born without others in the collective being sacrificed.”

— Fredrik Backman

180. “Because sometimes love isn’t enough.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

183. “If you support Tottenham you always give more love than you get back... Tottenham is the worst kind of bad team, because they’re almost good. They always promise that they’re going to be fantastic. They make you hope. So you go on loving them and they carry on finding more and more innovative ways of disappointing you.”

— Fredrik Backman

184. “And we know that it’s very common for people suffering from depression to be afraid of feeling happy. Because even depression can be a sort of secure bubble, it can make you start to think, If I’m not unhappy, if I’m not angry – who am I then?”

— Fredrik Backman

185. “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

186. “Soccer forces life to move on. There’s always a new match. A new season. There’s always a dream that everything can get better. It’s a game of wonders.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

189. “Feelings are complicated. Actions are simple.”

— Fredrik Backman

190. “We pretend to be good parents when all we really do is provide our kids with food and clothing and tell them off when they put chewing gum they find on the ground in their mouths.”

— Fredrik Backman

191. “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

192. “The teacher wanted us to write what we thought the meaning of life was once.” “What did you write?” “Company.” Grandpa closes his eyes. “That’s the best answer I’ve heard.” “My teacher said I had to write a longer answer.” “So what did you do?” “I wrote: Company. And ice cream.” Grandpa spends a moment or two thinking that over. Then he asks: “What kind of ice cream?” Noah smiles. It’s nice to be understood.”

— Fredrik Backman

193. “I don’t believe in violence, Leo, because my dad used to hit me if I so much as spilled a bit of milk. That didn’t teach me not to spill milk, it just made me afraid of milk.” He doesn’t know if Leo.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

195. “Spring arrives. It always finds us, in the end. The wind sweeps winter away, the trees rustle and birds start making a fuss, and nature suddenly crashes through with a deafening roar where the snow has swallowed every echo for months.”

— Fredrik Backman

196. “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

197. “Have you ever seen a town fall? Ours did. We’ll end up saying that violence came to Beartown this summer, but that will be a lie; the violence was already here. Because sometimes hating one another is so easy that it seems incomprehensible that we ever do anything else.”

— Fredrik Backman

198. “In the silence of the forest you don’t have to scream to be threatening.”

— Fredrik Backman

199. “We love winners, even though they’re very rarely particularly likeable people.”

— Fredrik Backman

200. “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