Top 500 Fredrik Backman Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “That’s why idiots are always so scared and aggressive. Because nothing scares idiots more than a smart girl.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

205. “When you’ve been together for a very long time, it’s the little things that matter. 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

206. “You never want to get away from home as much as you do when you’re fifteen years old. It’s like her mom usually says when the cold and darkness have worn away at her patience and she’s had three or four glasses of wine: “you can’t live in this town, Maya, you can only survive it.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

208. “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

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. “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

211. “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

212. “Us against you.”

— Fredrik Backman

213. “They always are, but when politics work in our favor we call it “cooperation,” and when it favors others we call it “corruption.” Peter looks out of the window. There are always flags raised in front of the council building so the bastards inside can see which way the wind is blowing.”

— Fredrik Backman

214. “We open our eyes in the morning and life is just waiting to tip a fresh avalanche of “Don’t Forget!”s and “Remember!”s over us. We don’t have time to think or breathe, we just wake up and start digging through the heap, because there will be another one dumped on us tomorrow.”

— Fredrik Backman

215. “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

216. “We fool ourselves that we can protect the people we love, because if we accepted the truth we’d never let them out of our sight.”

— Fredrik Backman

217. “No one tells you before you procreate that the hardest thing about being a good parent is that you never feel like one. If you’re absent you’re committing one big mistake, but if you’re present the whole time you commit a million tiny ones, and teenagers keep a count. Oh, how they keep a count.”

— Fredrik Backman

218. “Her friends couldn’t see why she woke up every morning and voluntarily decided to share the whole day with him. He couldn’t either. He built her a bookshelf and she filled it with books by people who wrote page after page about their feelings. Ove understood things he could see and touch. Wood and concrete. Glass and steel. Tools. Things one could figure out. He understood right angles and clear instruction manuals. Assembly models and drawings. Things one could draw on paper.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

220. “He can’t understand people who long to retire. How can anyone spend their whole life longing for the day when they become superfluous? Wandering about, a burden on society, what sort of man would ever wish for that? Staying at home, waiting to die. Or even worse: waiting for them to come and fetch you and put you in a home. Being dependent on other people to get to the toilet.”

— Fredrik Backman

221. “Our hearts are bars of soap that we keep losing hold of.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

223. “He had a sense of humor that only his players were allowed to see, and it made them feel special. Jokes are powerful like that, they can be both inclusive and exclusive. Can create both an Us and a Them.”

— Fredrik Backman

224. “The older man thinks the most important thing is for a police officer to do the right thing, the younger thinks it’s more important to do things correctly.”

— Fredrik Backman

225. “Why do you want to climb Mount Everest?” The mountaineer replied in bemusement, as if the question was ridiculous and the answer obvious, “Because it’s there.” Kira understood then, because why had she wanted to go to university when no one else in her family had been? Why had she chosen law when everyone had told her it would be too hard? Why? To find out if she could do it. Because she wanted to climb that damn mountain. Because it was there.”

— Fredrik Backman

226. “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

227. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

229. “It was a long story. All stories are, when it comes down to it, if you tell them from the start.”

— Fredrik Backman

230. “Our spontaneous reactions are rarely our proudest moments. It’s said that a person’s first thought is the most honest, but that often isn’t true. It’s often just the most stupid. Why else would we have afterthoughts?”

— Fredrik Backman

231. “The truth is that this was a story about many different things, but most of all about idiots. Because we’re doing the best we can, we really are.”

— Fredrik Backman

232. “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

233. “You’re not scared. You’re just grieving. No one tells you humans that your sorrow feels like fear.”

— Fredrik Backman

234. “The real estate agent takes a deep breath and says what women usually say to men who never seem to think that their lack of knowledge should get in the way of a confident opinion. “I’m sure you’re right.”

— Fredrik Backman

235. “Benji has realized how similar he is to the dogs: if you make yourself useful, you get a longer leash.”

— Fredrik Backman

236. “But not all animals want revenge, we’re the only ones who do that, waiting in the darkness all night so we can get back at someone for something. Only we do that.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

238. “Everyone is someone else’s Stockholmer, I guess.”

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

— Fredrik Backman

241. “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

242. “They say the best men are born out of their faults and that they often improve later on, more than if they’d never done anything wrong.”

— Fredrik Backman

243. “Regardless of how many shortcomings the person you fall in love with might have, I can guarantee that you still come out on top of that bargain. So find someone who doesn’t love you for the person you are, but despite the person you are.”

— Fredrik Backman

244. “I heard a man who worked in a casino say that no one gets ruined by losing, they get ruined by trying to win back the money they lost. Is that what you mean? Is that.”

— Fredrik Backman

245. “You can’t live long with the ones who are only beautiful, Jules. But the funny ones, oh, they last a lifetime.”

— Fredrik Backman

246. “Sometimes we have to get rid of stuff to make room for new stuff, and then we start to miss the old stuff so much that we have to build new stuff that pretends to be the old stuff.”

— Fredrik Backman

247. “They laugh until no one can forget that this is what we leave behind when we go: the laughs.”

— Fredrik Backman

248. “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”

— Fredrik Backman

249. “He loses himself in his own thoughts. Floats away, as if in a mist. He’s never been the sort of man who does that, has never been a daydreamer, but lately it’s as if something’s twisted up in his head. He’s having increasing difficulty concentrating on things. He doesn’t like it at all.”

— Fredrik Backman

250. “The truth? The truth about all this? The truth is that this was a story about many different things, but most of all about idiots.”

— Fredrik Backman