Top 500 Fredrik Backman Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

253. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

259. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

261. “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

262. “All his life Bobo has wanted just one thing to be allowed to belong to something.”

— Fredrik Backman

263. “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

264. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

266. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

268. “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

269. “Words are not small things.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

279. “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

280. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

282. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

294. “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

295. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

297. “There’s a constant threat of violence hidden just beneath the surface of a certain type of person in this town that Peter never noticed when he was growing up, but which struck him all the more plainly after he came home from Canada.”

— Fredrik Backman

298. “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

299. “Sometimes it’s hard to explain why some men suddenly do the things they do. And Ove had probably known all along what he had to do, whom he had to help before he could die. But we are always optimists when it comes to time; we think there will be time to do things with other people. And time to say things to them.”

— Fredrik Backman

300. “The truth is that this was a story about many different things, but most of all about idiots. Because we’re doing the best we can, we really are.”

— Fredrik Backman