Top 500 Fredrik Backman Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “All his life Bobo has wanted just one thing to be allowed to belong to something.”

— Fredrik Backman

252. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

254. “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

255. “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

256. “When you’re young and in love you think the difficult part of being in a relationship is admitting when you need help, but when you’ve been married for half your life you know that the hardest thing is admitting that you really don’t: you don’t need anyone’s help to feel inadequate and a failure and worthless.”

— Fredrik Backman

257. “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

258. “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

259. “There are thousands of ways to die in Beartown. Especially on the inside.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

261. “You’ll wake up soon. It’s Christmas Eve morning. And I loved you.”

— Fredrik Backman

262. “This sport demands only one thing from you. Your all.”

— Fredrik Backman

263. “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

264. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

266. “Death is the ultimate state of powerlessness. Powerlessness is the ultimate despair.”

— Fredrik Backman

267. “Having a grandmother is like having an army. This is a grandchild’s ultimate privilege: knowing that someone is on your side, always, whatever the details.”

— Fredrik Backman

268. “Men are busy, but boys don’t stop growing. Sons want their fathers’ attention until the precise moment when fathers want their sons’.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

271. “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

272. “His colleagues learned to appreciate him for it. “When people don’t talk so much they don’t dish out the crap either,” one of his older workmates said to him one afternoon down on the track. And Ove nodded. Some got it and some didn’t.”

— Fredrik Backman

273. “The best thing about nature is that it isn’t nostalgic; rocks and trees don’t give a damn about their previous owners.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

276. “You go to the hospital to die, Ove knows that. It’s enough that the state wants to be paid for everything you do while you’re alive. When it also wants to be paid for the parking when you go to die, Ove thinks that’s about far enough.”

— Fredrik Backman

277. “One day that little kid grew up and raised a bankruptcy-threatened club that everyone had written off to the second-best in the country, and then he raised himself up to the NHL, the impossible path from the forest to the stars. Before fate snatched it all away from him. It was Sune who called Peter in Canada after the funeral and told him that Beartown needed a general manager.”

— Fredrik Backman

278. “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

279. “The love a parent feels for a child is strange. There is a starting point to our love for everyone else, but not this person. This one we have always loved, we loved them before they even existed. No matter how well prepared they are, all moms and dads experience a moment of total shock, when the tidal wave of feelings first washes through them, knocking them off their feet.”

— Fredrik Backman

280. “It’s going to be a grand adventure and a fairy tale of marvels. But it’s my fault that you’ll find a dragon at the end, my darling knight.”

— Fredrik Backman

281. “Places like this always have to pin their hopes for the future on young people. They’re the ones who don’t remember that things actually used to be better. That can be a blessing. So they’ve coached their junior team with the same values their forebears used to construct their community: work hard, take the knocks, don’t complain, keep your mouth shut and show the bastards in the big cities where we’re from.”

— Fredrik Backman

282. “You do get irritated by someone taking an interest in you, when you’re not used to it.”

— Fredrik Backman

283. “Maya knows all too well that this silence can be like water. If you let it make its way too far in, it can freeze into ice and break your heart. Even then, in the police station in Hed, she knew she would survive this. Even then, she knew that her mom and dad wouldn’t. Parents don’t heal.”

— Fredrik Backman

284. “It’s so easy to place your hope in people. To think that the world can change overnight. We demonstrate after an attack, we donate money after a disaster, we lay our hearts bare online. But for every step forward we take, we take an almost equally large step back. Seen over time, every change is so slow that it’s barely visible when it’s happening.”

— Fredrik Backman

285. “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

286. “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

287. “Words are not small things.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

289. “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

290. “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

291. “Two drowning people with lead weights around their ankles may not be each other’s salvation; if they hold hands, they’ll just sink twice as fast. In the end the weight of carrying each other’s broken hearts becomes unbearable.”

— Fredrik Backman

292. “That’s why we get the chance to spoil our grandchildren, because by doing that we’re apologizing to our children.” “And how do we stop our children from hating us for that?” “We can’t. That’s not our job.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

294. “There are plenty of things that hurt people without people ever really knowing why. Anxiety can act as internal gravity, shrinking the soul.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

296. “The problem with the middle class is that you think that someone can be too rich to buy things. But that’s not true. you can only be too poor.”

— Fredrik Backman

297. “Ove feels an instinctive skepticism towards all people taller than six feet; the blood can’t quite make it all the way up to the brain.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

299. “It’s probably full of disgusting diseases and rabies and all sorts of things!” Ove looks at the cat. Looks at the Weed. Nods. “And so are you, most likely. But we don’t throw stones at you because of it.”

— Fredrik Backman

300. “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