Top 500 Fredrik Backman Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “Maybe all people have that feeling deep down, that your hometown is something you can never really escape, but can never really go home to, either. Because it’s not home anymore. We’re not trying to make peace with it. Not with the streets and bricks of it. Just with the person we were back then. And maybe forgive ourselves for everything we thought we would become and didn’t.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

255. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

257. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

259. “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

260. “She said I’m overprotective. That I’m one of those penguins that squats on top of a stone because I don’t want to accept that the egg has gone.”

— Fredrik Backman

261. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

265. “The only day you can influence is today. You can’t do a damn thing about yesterday and tomorrow, but you can do something about TODAY!”

— Fredrik Backman

266. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

268. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

271. “Anna-Lena smiled weakly. ‘Have you ever held a three-year-old by the hand on the way home from preschool?”

— Fredrik Backman

272. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

278. “Some people accept that they will never be free of their anxiety, they just learn to carry it. She tried to be one of them. She told herself that was why you should always be nice to other people, even idiots, because you never know how heavy their burden is.”

— Fredrik Backman

279. “At a certain age almost all the questions a person asks him or herself are really just about one thing: how should you live your life?”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

281. “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

282. “And there’s one thing you need to know: desire always beats luck.”

— Fredrik Backman

283. “We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

291. “Love one another until death do us part,’ isn’t that what we said? Isn’t that what we promised each other? Or am I remembering wrong? ‘Or at least until one of us gets bored.’ Maybe that was it?”

— Fredrik Backman

292. “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

293. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

295. “Perhaps there’s a biological reason for that, that up to a certain age a child loves you unconditionally and hopelessly for one single reason: you’re theirs. Which is a pretty smart move on biology’s part, you have to give it that.”

— 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. “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

298. “The real estate agent takes a deep breath and says what women usually say to men who never seem to think that their lack of knowledge should get in the way of a confident opinion. “I’m sure you’re right.”

— Fredrik Backman

299. “They wouldn’t do it without a cause, would they? You must have done something to provoke them.” As if that’s how oppression works.”

— 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