Top 500 Fredrik Backman Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “That’s the lot of being a parent: at first all activities are done for their sake, and in the end for ours. Eventually we realize that everything is about us wanting to be wherever they are, as much as possible, for as long as they let us.”

— Fredrik Backman

304. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

314. “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

315. “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

316. “She was fifteen and had access to the Internet; she already knew that the world is a cruel place if you’re a girl. Her parents couldn’t imagine that this could happen, but Maya simply hadn’t expected it to happen to her.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

322. “The worst thing about having power over other people’s lives is that you sometimes get things wrong.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

325. “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

326. “That’s all this is about. We want you to be better than us. Because if our kids don’t grow up to be better than us, then what’s the point of all this? We want you to be kinder, smarter, more humble, more generous, and more selfless than we are.”

— Fredrik Backman

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

332. “Nowadays people changed their stuff so often that any expertise in how to make things last was becoming superfluous.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

334. “It’s difficult to know when love blooms; suddenly one day you wake up and it’s in full flower. It works the same way when it wilts-one day it is just too late. Love has a great deal in common with balcony plants in that way. Sometimes not even baking soda makes a difference.”

— Fredrik Backman

335. “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

336. “One morning you wake up with more life behind you than in front of you, not being able to understand how it’s happened.”

— Fredrik Backman

337. “But in the end all he can manage to utter is: “I want you to know, Britt-Marie, that every time there’s a knock on my front door, I hope it’s you.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

339. “Have you learned any theories about why people behave like that, then?” “Hundreds,” the psychologist smiled. “Which one do you believe?” “I believe the one that says that if you do it for long enough, it can become impossible to tell the difference between flying and falling.”

— Fredrik Backman

340. “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

341. “In his youth Jim had dreams of becoming a writer. In fact he was still dreaming about that until long into Jack’s childhood. Then he started to dream that Jack might become a writer instead. That’s an impossible thing for sons to grasp, and a source of shame for fathers to have to admit: that we don’t want our children to pursue their own dreams or walk in our footsteps. We want to walk in their footsteps while they pursue our dreams.”

— Fredrik Backman

342. “Because I want us to have more than a marriage. I want us to help each other to become better people.”

— Fredrik Backman

343. “My wife had a terrible sense of humor as well. She liked laughing and causing trouble. The older she got, the more trouble she was. She always told me I was too nice. That’s a terrible thing to be told by a priest, isn’t it?”

— Fredrik Backman

344. “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

345. “Anyway, this is a cashless bank, and are you really going to try to rob a cashless bank, or what? Are you, like, totally stupid?”

— Fredrik Backman

346. “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

347. “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

348. “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

349. “And when she giggled she sounded the way Ove imagined champagne bubbles would have sounded if they were capable of laughter.”

— Fredrik Backman

350. “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