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

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

307. “When Isak died Peter thought he would be left numb, but instead it was as if all his pores opened up, so that the air itself started to hurt. His chest can be ripped open by a single unhappy glance from either of the children, particularly his daughter. All the time he was growing up, the only thing he wanted was for life to speed up, and now all he wants is for it to slow down. For the clocks to stop, for Maya never to grow up.”

— Fredrik Backman

308. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

310. “You can’t live in this town, Maya, you can only survive it.”

— Fredrik Backman

311. “They’re fifteen and seventeen years old, and in ten years’ time they’ll remember this evening, when all the others were inside having a party, and they stood out here and became friends.”

— Fredrik Backman

312. “Because her parents had taught her during their flight through the mountains that humor is the soul’s last line of defense, and as long as we’re laughing we’re alive, so bad puns and fart jokes were their way of expressing their defiance against despair. Ro told Julia all this that first night, and after that Julia got to spend all of the world’s everydays with her.”

— Fredrik Backman

313. “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

314. “We’re just strangers passing each other, your anxieties briefly brushing against mine as the fibers of our coats touch momentarily on a crowded sidewalk somewhere. We never really know what to do to each other, with each other, for each other.”

— Fredrik Backman

315. “Her laughter catches him off guard. As if it’s carbonated and someone has poured it too fast and it’s bubbling over in all directions. It doesn’t fit at all with the gray cement and right-angled garden paving stones. It’s an untidy, mischievous laugh that refuses to go along with rules and prescriptions.”

— Fredrik Backman

316. “I’ve always thought that ice is nature’s way of telling people to stay away from the water.”

— Fredrik Backman

317. “We’ve created lives where we can watch other people crash into the wall but still hope that somehow we’re going to pass straight through it. The closer we get, more confidently we believe that some unlikely solution is miraculously going to save us, while everyone watching us is just waiting for the crash.”

— Fredrik Backman

318. “Lies are simple; truth is difficult.”

— Fredrik Backman

319. “No one tells you before you procreate that the hardest thing about being a good parent is that you never feel like one. If you’re absent you’re committing one big mistake, but if you’re present the whole time you commit a million tiny ones, and teenagers keep a count. Oh, how they keep a count.”

— Fredrik Backman

320. “That’s the problem with dreams: you can get to the top of the mountain and discover that you’re scared of heights.”

— Fredrik Backman

321. “Grateful, grateful, grateful. That’s the role of mothers. But the role of children is to dream. So her son dreams that his mother will one day be able to walk into a room without having to apologize.”

— Fredrik Backman

322. “He can’t understand people who long to retire. How can anyone spend their whole life longing for the day when they become superfluous? Wandering about, a burden on society, what sort of man would ever wish for that? Staying at home, waiting to die. Or even worse: waiting for them to come and fetch you and put you in a home. Being dependent on other people to get to the toilet.”

— Fredrik Backman

323. “I... she... that’s your grandma. She was younger. You never got to meet her young, she has... she had the strongest feelings I ever experienced in a person, when she got angry she could empty a full bar of grown men, and when she was happy... there was no defending yourself against that, Noahnoah. She was a force of nature. Everything I am came from her, she was my Big Bang.”

— Fredrik Backman

324. “Why do you want to climb Mount Everest?” The mountaineer replied in bemusement, as if the question was ridiculous and the answer obvious, “Because it’s there.” Kira understood then, because why had she wanted to go to university when no one else in her family had been? Why had she chosen law when everyone had told her it would be too hard? Why? To find out if she could do it. Because she wanted to climb that damn mountain. Because it was there.”

— Fredrik Backman

325. “The older man thinks the most important thing is for a police officer to do the right thing, the younger thinks it’s more important to do things correctly.”

— Fredrik Backman

326. “Well, then. Let’s skip the pleasantries. You know why I’m here?” Ramona looks curious. “No, but I bet you’ve brought some gold with you. Tails has brought frankincense. And there’s a third wise man standing outside the door with his pants stuffed full of myrrh. Is that more or less right?”

— Fredrik Backman

327. “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

328. “If a human being closes her eyes hard and long enough, she can remember all the times she has made a choice in her life just for her own sake. And realize, perhaps, that it has never happened.”

— Fredrik Backman

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

332. “Our spontaneous reactions are rarely our proudest moments. It’s said that a person’s first thought is the most honest, but that often isn’t true. It’s often just the most stupid. Why else would we have afterthoughts?”

— Fredrik Backman

333. “It’s always the aggressors’ feelings we have to defend. As if they’re the ones who need our understanding.”

— Fredrik Backman

334. “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

335. “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

336. “Sami went to town to protect someone who doesn’t deserve it, and Britt-Marie is getting ready to go home for the same reason. Because if we don’t forgive those we love, then what is left? What is love if it’s not loving our lovers even when they don’t deserve it?”

— Fredrik Backman

337. “Bitterness can be corrosive. It can rewrite your memories as if it were scrubbing a crime scene clean, until in the end you only remember what suits you of its causes.”

— Fredrik Backman

338. “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

339. “You know, all my thoughts about morals and ethics boil down to one single thing: not if it concerns your family. You can have a thousand principles, but not if it concerns your family. That’s what you protect first and foremost, above morals, even above the law. Family first.”

— Fredrik Backman

340. “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

341. “Deep down, in memories that we might prefer to suppress even from ourselves, a lot of us know that the difference between us and that man on the bridge is smaller than we might wish.”

— Fredrik Backman

342. “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

343. “When it comes to terror, reality’s got nothing on the power of the imagination.”

— Fredrik Backman

344. “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

345. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

347. “Everyone is someone else’s Stockholmer, I guess.”

— Fredrik Backman

348. “When something goes right for a team everything feels easy, so it automatically goes even better. But if you can cause a bit of trouble for them, only a very little bit, you’ll soon see that they manage to create a lot more trouble for themselves.”

— Fredrik Backman

349. “Regardless of how many shortcomings the person you fall in love with might have, I can guarantee that you still come out on top of that bargain. So find someone who doesn’t love you for the person you are, but despite the person you are.”

— Fredrik Backman

350. “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