Top 500 Fredrik Backman Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “Both men, once as close as men of that sort could be, stare at each other. One of them a man who refuses to forget the past, and one who can’t remember it at all.”

— Fredrik Backman

205. “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

206. “Jokes are powerful like that, they can be both inclusive and exclusive. Can create both an Us and a Them.”

— Fredrik Backman

207. “When I was little, my dad used to hit me if I spilled my milk, Leo. That didn’t teach me not to spill things. It just made me scared of milk. Remember that.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

209. “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

210. “Unfairness is a far more natural state in the world than fairness.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “The problem is that everything is relative, happiness is based on expectations, and we have the Internet now.”

— Fredrik Backman

219. “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

220. “People can bury so many of their loved ones during a lifetime and still get up the morning after, but something inside gets a bit heavier each time;.”

— Fredrik Backman

221. “And there’s one thing you need to know: desire always beats luck.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

223. “We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday.”

— Fredrik Backman

224. “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. Life can go on sorts of different ways but it will probably go wrong.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

232. “Where you are born and who you become is a cruel lottery.”

— Fredrik Backman

233. “Remember, a good friend helps you move, but a great friend helps you move a dead body.”

— Fredrik Backman

234. “Never trust people who don’t have something in their lives that they love beyond all reason.”

— Fredrik Backman

235. “The only day you can influence is today. You can’t do a damn thing about yesterday and tomorrow, but you can do something about TODAY!”

— Fredrik Backman

236. “You never stop being scared of falling from the top, because when you close your eyes you can still feel the pain from each and every step of the way up.”

— Fredrik Backman

237. “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

238. “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

239. “Eine der schrecklichen Auswirkungen der Trauer besteht darin, dass wir ihre Abwesenheit als Egoismus ansehen.”

— Fredrik Backman

240. “Nothing is black and white in Beartown. It’s red or green. And red is Hed’s color.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

242. “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

243. “You don’t fall in love with a gender, Anna-Lena. You fall in love with an idiot.”

— Fredrik Backman

244. “Time always moves at the same rate, only feelings have different speeds. Every day can mark a whole lifetime or a single heartbeat, depending on who you spend it with.”

— Fredrik Backman

245. “Dad has a word jar, where Elsa puts difficult words she has learned, like “concise” and “pretentious,” or complex phrases like “My fridge is a taco sauce graveyard.” And every time the jar is full she gets a gift voucher for a book to download on the iPad. The word jar has financed the entire Harry Potter series for her, although she knows Dad is ridiculously dubious about Harry Potter because Dad can’t get his head around a story unless it’s based on reality.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

247. “All adults have days when we feel completely drained. When we no longer know quite what we spend so much time fighting for, when reality and everyday worries overwhelm us and we wonder how much longer we’re going to be able to carry on. The wonderful thing is that we can all live through far more days like that without breaking than we think. The terrible thing is that we never know exactly how many.”

— Fredrik Backman

248. “And when she giggled she sounded the way Ove imagined champagne bubbles would have sounded if they were capable of laughter.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

250. “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