Top 500 Fredrik Backman Quotes (2025 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. “And that laughter of hers, which, for the rest of his life, would make him feel as if someone was running around barefoot on the inside of his breast.”

— Fredrik Backman

253. “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

254. “It’s a terrible moment for all kids when we realise that our parents can’t protect us. That we won’t be able to protect our own. That the whole world can come and take us whenever it likes.”

— Fredrik Backman

255. “They never argue anymore, unless perhaps they argue all the time. When you’ve been stuck with each other long enough it can seem like there’s no difference between no longer arguing and no longer caring.”

— Fredrik Backman

256. “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

257. “The worst thing about having power over other people’s lives is that you sometimes get things wrong.”

— Fredrik Backman

258. “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

259. “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

260. “Women are always the problem in the men’s world.”

— Fredrik Backman

261. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

263. “Have you ever seen a town fall? Ours did. We’ll end up saying that violence came to Beartown this summer, but that will be a lie; the violence was already here. Because sometimes hating one another is so easy that it seems incomprehensible that we ever do anything else.”

— Fredrik Backman

264. “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

265. “Sometimes ‘Stockholm’ can actually be a compliment: a dream of somewhere bigger, where we can become someone else. Something that we long for but don’t quite dare to do.”

— Fredrik Backman

266. “She isn’t traumatized, she isn’t weighed down by any obvious grief. She’s just sad, all the time. An evil little creature that wouldn’t have shown up on any X-rays was living in her chest, rushing through her blood and filling her head with whispers, saying she wasn’t good enough, that she was weak and ugly and would never be anything but broken.”

— Fredrik Backman

267. “Anxiety can act as internal gravity, shrinking the soul.”

— Fredrik Backman

268. “How could anyone live with the stress of knowing that while their partner was in the bathroom, they could be swiping right or left and finding their soul mate? A whole generation would end up getting urinary tract infections because they had to keep waiting to pee until the charge on their partner’s phone ran out.”

— Fredrik Backman

269. “At the end of your career you’re trying to find a point to it all, and at the start of it you’re looking for a purpose.”

— Fredrik Backman

270. “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

271. “We probably make all the same mistakes that your generation did. Just different versions of them.”

— Fredrik Backman

272. “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

273. “She is told all the things she shouldn’t have done: She shouldn’t have waited so long before going to the police. She shouldn’t have gotten rid of the clothes she was wearing. Shouldn’t have showered. Shouldn’t have drunk alcohol. Shouldn’t have put herself in that situation. Shouldn’t have gone into the room, up the stairs, given him the impression. If only she hadn’t existed, then none of this would have happened, why didn’t she think of that?”

— Fredrik Backman

274. “When she met Knut it wasn’t a love story, not the way she had read it could feel, theirs was always more like a story of a child finding the perfect playmate. When Knut touched Estelle, right up to the end, it made her feel like climbing trees and jumping from jetties. Most of all she missed making him laugh so hard he spat his breakfast out. That sort of thing only got more fun with age, especially after he got false teeth.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

276. “A common misconception about dangerous people is that they lack emotions, That they aren’t sentimental. That’s almost never true, often the most sentimental and sensitive people are the most dangerous, because they’re not only capable of abuse, but can also justify it. Sensitive people never feel that they’re doing the wrong thing because their feelings always convince them they’re on the right side.”

— Fredrik Backman

277. “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

278. “So her whispers were half washed away by tears when she replied: “God doesn’t protect people from knives, sweetheart. That’s why God gave us other people, so we can protect each other.”

— Fredrik Backman

279. “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

280. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

283. “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

284. “What you create, others can destroy. Create anyway. Because in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and anyone else anyway.”

— Fredrik Backman

285. “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

286. “Her mom sometimes whispers in her daughter’s ear: “Never trust people who don’t have something in their lives that they love beyond all reason.”

— Fredrik Backman

287. “If you are honest, people may deceive you. Be honest anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfishness. Be kind anyway.”

— Fredrik Backman

288. “A young man left Beartown in silence and when he came home again it was too late for words. You can’t look a gravestone in the eye and ask its forgiveness.”

— Fredrik Backman

289. “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

290. “A long marriage consists of such small things that when they get lost we don’t even know where to start looking for them.”

— Fredrik Backman

291. “In his youth Jim had dreams of becoming a writer. In fact he was still dreaming about that until long into Jack’s childhood. Then he started to dream that Jack might become a writer instead. That’s an impossible thing for sons to grasp, and a source of shame for fathers to have to admit: that we don’t want our children to pursue their own dreams or walk in our footsteps. We want to walk in their footsteps while they pursue our dreams.”

— Fredrik Backman

292. “Words are not small things.”

— Fredrik Backman

293. “It’s hard to tell exactly when a person’s substance abuse begins, which is why everyone is lying when they say: “I’ve got it under control.” Drugs are a sort of dusk that grant us the illusion that we’re the ones who decide when the light goes out, but that power never belongs to us. The darkness takes us whenever it likes.”

— Fredrik Backman

294. “Mothers and daughters know how to wound each other in totally unique ways, possibly because daughters often carry the guilt of their mothers’ consciences, until they end up arguing about sins that they haven’t even committed.”

— Fredrik Backman

295. “And she will never find anything in her life more unfathomable than the fact that the boy she gave birth to in a place that has never seen snow was born to play a sport on ice.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

297. “Over time she realized that deep down almost everyone asks themselves the same sort of questions: Am I good? Do I make anyone proud? Am I useful to society? Am I good at my job? Generous and considerate? A decent shag? Does anyone want me to be their friend? Have I been a good parent? Am I a good person?”

— Fredrik Backman

298. “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

299. “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

300. “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