Top 500 Fredrik Backman Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

256. “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

257. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

275. “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

276. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

278. “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

279. “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

280. “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

281. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

283. “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

284. “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

285. “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

286. “Words are not small things.”

— Fredrik Backman

287. “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

288. “Parents are defined by their mistakes.” Do you think this statement is true?”

— Fredrik Backman

289. “His mom always said that every child is like a heart transplant. He understands that now.”

— Fredrik Backman

290. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

292. “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

293. “I’ll bring you to the Land-of-Almost-Awake, and we’ll eat dreams and dance and laugh and cry and be brave and forgive people, and we’ll fly with the cloud animals and Granny will be sitting on a bench in Miasmas, smoking and waiting for us.”

— Fredrik Backman

294. “And then she left him alone in a world where he no longer understood the language.”

— Fredrik Backman

295. “Time always moves at the same rate, only feelings have different speeds.”

— Fredrik Backman

296. “The very finest thing you can give a child is somewhere to belong. The biggest thing you can have is being part of something.”

— Fredrik Backman

297. “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

298. “Zara had explained that “democracy as a system is doomed, because idiots will believe anything as long as the story’s good enough.”

— Fredrik Backman

299. “And Ove realized that he wanted to hear her talking about the things she loved for the rest of his life.”

— Fredrik Backman

300. “Humor is the soul’s last line of defense, and as long as we’re laughing we’re alive.”

— Fredrik Backman