Top 500 Fredrik Backman Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Winners have a tendency to be forgiven in this town.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

203. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

205. “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

206. “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

207. “God is incredibly important to people. Particularly to the people who don’t actually believe in God. In my experience, no one wants to talk to you about God as much as the people who claim they absolutely do not want to talk to you about God. And sooner or later, one of them will stare at you and ask, “But if God exists, then why are there wars?”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

209. “Some people accept that they will never be free of their anxiety, they just learn to carry it. She tried to be one of them. She told herself that was why you should always be nice to other people, even idiots, because you never know how heavy their burden is.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

211. “Perhaps we hurried past each other in a crowd today, and neither of us noticed, and the fibers of your coat brushed against mine for a single moment and then we were gone. I don’t know who you are. But when you get home this evening, when this day is over and the night takes us, allow yourself a deep breath. Because we made it through this day as well.”

— Fredrik Backman

212. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

214. “It’s never only a dog. It’s family.”

— Fredrik Backman

215. “God doesn’t protect people from knives, sweetheart. That’s why God gave us other people, so we can protect each other.”

— Fredrik Backman

216. “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

217. “Tomorrow, the Beartown Ice Hockey Club’s junior team is playing in the semifinal of the biggest youth tournament in the country. How important can something like that be? In most places, not so important, of course, but Beartown isn’t most places.”

— Fredrik Backman

218. “Maybe all people have that feeling deep down, that your hometown is something you can never really escape, but can never really go home to, either. Because it’s not home anymore. We’re not trying to make peace with it. Not with the streets and bricks of it. Just with the person we were back then. And maybe forgive ourselves for everything we thought we would become and didn’t.”

— Fredrik Backman

219. “There’s a label she used to love but which she loathes when it’s pronounced in a Beartown accent: “career woman.” Peter’s friends call her that, some in admiration and some with distaste, but no one calls Peter a “career man.” It strikes a nerve because Kira recognizes that insinuation: you have a “job” so you can provide for your family, whereas a “career” is selfish. You have one of those for your own sake.”

— Fredrik Backman

220. “Life is so damn, damn, damn tough sometimes that it’s almost unbearable. Even if that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

— Fredrik Backman

221. “People say she’s gone mad, because that’s what people who know nothing about loneliness call it.”

— Fredrik Backman

222. “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

223. “One of the most painful moments in a person’s life probably comes with the insight that an age has been reached when there is more to look back on than ahead.”

— Fredrik Backman

224. “Everyone I know with any sense has two families, the one they were given and the one they chose. You can’t do anything about the first, but you can damn well take responsibility for the second!”

— Fredrik Backman

225. “All the best people are different -look at superheroes. After all, if superpowers were normal, everyone would have them.”

— Fredrik Backman

226. “She was about to add that Harry Potter was also an orphan, and to be like Harry Potter in any way at all is actually the coolest thing there is, but she’s starting to realize that The Monster probably doesn’t read as much quality literature as one might hope.”

— Fredrik Backman

227. “So the first thing that happens in a conflict is that we choose a side, because that’s easier than trying to hold two thoughts in our heads at the same time.”

— Fredrik Backman

228. “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

229. “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

230. “It was as if he didn’t want other people to talk to him, he was afraid that their chattering voices would drown out the memory of her voice.”

— Fredrik Backman

231. “Tomorrow he will wake up, get out of bed, and start again.”

— Fredrik Backman

232. “People need bureaucracy, to give them time to think before they do something stupid.”

— Fredrik Backman

233. “Humanity has many shortcomings, but none is stronger than pride.”

— Fredrik Backman

234. “They stamp the slush off their boots with autopilot eyes and answering-machine voices while they wait for their drug of choice – caffeine or nicotine or sugar – to kick in and render their bodies at least tolerably functional until the first break.”

— Fredrik Backman

235. “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

236. “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

237. “To lose your family long before you’ve had time to create your own to replace it. It’s a very specific sort of loneliness.”

— Fredrik Backman

238. “You only need one ray of light to chase all the shadows away,” she said to him once, when he asked her why she had to be so upbeat the whole time. Apparently some monk called Francis had written as much in one of her books.”

— Fredrik Backman

239. “Kevin might be the star, but Benjamin Ovich is the heart of the team because Benji is like David: he’s prepared to do whatever it takes. So ever since he was small, the coach has drummed one single idea into him: “Don’t pay any attention to what people say, Benji. They’ll like us well enough when we start winning.”

— Fredrik Backman

240. “All roads lead to something you were predestined to do.”

— Fredrik Backman

241. “Sometimes it is difficult to explain why some men suddenly do the things they do. Sometimes, of course, it’s because they know they’ll do them sooner or later anyway, and so they may as well just do them now. And sometimes it’s the pure opposite – because they realise they should have done them long ago.”

— Fredrik Backman

242. “When William Lyt was younger and Kevin Erdahl was made team captain, William heard the coach say to Kevin, “You can force people to obey you, but you can never force them to follow you. If you want them to play for you, they have to love you.”

— Fredrik Backman

243. “People sometimes say that sorrow is mental but longing is physical. One is a wound, the other an amputated limb, a withered petal compared to a snapped stem.”

— Fredrik Backman

244. “Dads are dads and daughters are daughters, and not even psychologists can quite come to terms with that.”

— Fredrik Backman

245. “That’s why idiots are always so scared and aggressive. Because nothing scares idiots more than a smart girl.”

— Fredrik Backman

246. “All his life Bobo has wanted just one thing to be allowed to belong to something.”

— Fredrik Backman

247. “Only different people change the world,” Granny used to say. “No one normal has ever changed a crapping thing.”

— Fredrik Backman

248. “Being married is easy, she usually thinks. You just pick an argument you’re really good at, then repeat it at least once a week for all eternity.”

— Fredrik Backman

249. “That’s the power of literature, you know, it can act like little love letters between two people who can only explain their feelings by pointing at other people’s.”

— Fredrik Backman

250. “The most unbearable thing about death is that the world just goes on. Time doesn’t care. The morning after the storm, the sun goes up as if it’s mocking us, over a wrecked forest and a battered town.”

— Fredrik Backman