Top 500 Fredrik Backman Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

320. “Because everyone loves someone, and anyone who loves someone has had those desperate nights where we lie awake trying to figure out how we can afford to carry on being human beings. Sometimes that makes us do things that seem ridiculous in hindsight, but which felt like the only way out at the time.”

— Fredrik Backman

321. “People feel pain. And it shrinks their souls.”

— Fredrik Backman

322. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

324. “Sometimes the safest place is when you flee to what seems the most dangerous,” said Granny, and then she described how the prince rode right into the darkest forest and the shadows stopped, hissing, at the edge.”

— Fredrik Backman

325. “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

326. “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

327. “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

328. “The worst thing we know about other people is that we’re dependent on them. That their actions affect our lives. Not just the people we choose, the people we like, but all the rest of them: the idiots.”

— Fredrik Backman

329. “It’s just that Sune is no longer sure that’s all a hockey team should consist of: boys who never lose.”

— Fredrik Backman

330. “I want someone to remember I existed. I want someone to know I was here.”

— Fredrik Backman

331. “It stuck with Jim that today’s youngsters had far too much choice, that was the whole problem – if all those modern dating apps had existed when Jims’ wife first met him, she would never have ended up becoming his wife. If you’re constantly presented with alternatives, you can never make up your mind, Jim thought.”

— Fredrik Backman

332. “One year? What wouldn’t we give for one more year? A year is an eternity.”

— Fredrik Backman

333. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

338. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

340. “But the universe gave you both Noah. He’s the bridge between you. That’s why we get the chance to spoil our grandchildren, because by doing that we’re apologizing to our children.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

342. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

344. “That’s the only thing someone who definitely wants to live and someone who definitely wants to die have in common: if you’re going to jump off something, you need to be pretty damn sure of the height.”

— Fredrik Backman

345. “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

346. “That’s always the way with sons of fathers who liked whisky a little too much: you either drink it all the time or not at all. There’s no in-between in some families.”

— Fredrik Backman

347. “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

348. “Because Elsa’s no fool. She knows if there was a dragon at the beginning of the story, the dragon will turn up again before the story is done. She knows everything has to become darker and more horrible before everything works out just fine at the end. Because that is how all the best stories go.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

350. “We become what we are told we are. Ana has always been told that she’s wrong.”

— Fredrik Backman