Top 500 Fredrik Backman Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Above all the other words for love, there ought to be one for this: one that says how many times we’ve come close to losing each other but turn back and start again. One for the very smallest things, the inches, when we brush past each other in the kitchen instead of only almost doing it. Something that says I can’t bear it. I can’t bear it if you can’t bear me. I can’t bear it without you. They.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

253. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

255. “Because if a sufficient number of people are different, no one has to be normal.”

— Fredrik Backman

256. “But if there’s one thing modern life and the Internet have taught us, it’s that you should never expect to win a discussion simply because you’re right.”

— Fredrik Backman

257. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

260. “You can always tell by the way people who love each other argue: the longer they’ve been together, the fewer words they need to start a fight.”

— Fredrik Backman

261. “Death is a slow drum. It counts every beat. We can’t haggle with it for more time.”

— Fredrik Backman

262. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

264. “You mustn’t tell lies, you mustn’t steal, you mustn’t kill, and you mustn’t throw stones at birds. We all agree on that. Except maybe swans, because swans can actually be passive-aggressive little bastards.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

270. “The truth of course is that if people really were as happy as they look on the Internet, they wouldn’t spend so much time on the Internet, because no one who’s having a really good day spends half of it taking pictures of themselves.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

272. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

274. “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

275. “My wife had a terrible sense of humor as well. She liked laughing and causing trouble. The older she got, the more trouble she was. She always told me I was too nice. That’s a terrible thing to be told by a priest, isn’t it?”

— Fredrik Backman

276. “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

277. “Not a second has passed since she had children without her feeling like a bad mother. For everything. For not understanding, for being impatient, for not knowing everything, not making better packed lunches, for still wanting more out of life than just being a mother. She hears other women in Beartown sigh behind her back: “Yes, but she has a full-time job, you know. Can you imagine?” No matter how much you try to let words like that run off you, a few of them stick.”

— Fredrik Backman

278. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

280. “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

281. “Words are not small things.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

283. “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

284. “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

285. “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

286. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

293. “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

294. “You’re a leader. People follow you. So frankly, if you can’t take responsibility for the actions of your followers, that makes you nothing but a monster.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

297. “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

298. “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

299. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman