Top 500 Fredrik Backman Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

162. “Us against you.”

— Fredrik Backman

163. “Parenthood can lead to a sequence of years when the children’s feelings suck all the oxygen out of a family, and that can be so emotionally intense that some adults go for years without having an opportunity to tell.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

166. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

169. “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

170. “Anxiety can act as internal gravity, shrinking the soul.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

176. “We lived an extraordinarily ordinary life.” “An ordinarily extraordinary life.”

— Fredrik Backman

177. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

179. “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.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

181. “If you have to ask the question, you simply wouldn’t understand the answer.”

— Fredrik Backman

182. “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

183. “Grief is the price we pay for love, Ramona. A broken heart in exchange for a whole one.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

185. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

190. “So she bowed her head and devoted herself to Beartown’s real traditional sports: shame and silence.”

— Fredrik Backman

191. “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

192. “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

193. “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

194. “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

195. “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

196. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman