Top 500 Fredrik Backman Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

356. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

358. “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

359. “People who have never been hunted always seem to think there’s a reason for it. ‘They wouldn’t do it without a cause, would they? You must have done something to provoke them.’ As if that was how oppression works.”

— Fredrik Backman

360. “When you’ve been stuck with each other long enough it can seem like there’s no difference between no longer arguing and no longer caring.”

— Fredrik Backman

361. “And that was how the people of Miaudacas learned that a queen only stays in power for as long as her subjects are afraid of conflict.”

— Fredrik Backman

362. “Then Grandpa starts to cry, silently and tearlessly, so that his grandson won’t realize.”

— Fredrik Backman

363. “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

364. “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

365. “It’s not that he’s the sort of man who gives up and dies; he doesn’t want her to think that. But it’s actually wrong, all this. She married him. And now he doesn’t quite know how to carry on without the tip of her nose in the pit between his throat and his shoulder. That’s all.”

— Fredrik Backman

366. “The world never feels bigger than when you’re holding the smallest person.”

— Fredrik Backman

367. “If a human being closes her eyes hard enough and for long enough, she can remember pretty well everything that has made her happy.”

— Fredrik Backman

368. “And I hope that you’ll never get it into your head that just because a woman deserves every opportunity you do, you have to stop holding the door open for her when you can. That you’ll never think it’s impossible to be equals and behave like a gentleman at the same time.”

— Fredrik Backman

369. “No matter how old they get, we never want to cry in front of our children. We’d do anything for them; they never know because they don’t understand the immensity of something that is unconditional. A parent’s love is unbearable, reckless, irresponsible.”

— Fredrik Backman

370. “The two men look at each other. Once upon a time they were mentor and pupil. Once upon a time the love between them was unshakeable. Times change.”

— Fredrik Backman

371. “All those words that make it sound as if change just grows naturally.”

— Fredrik Backman

372. “One of the most human things about anxiety is that we try to cure chaos with chaos.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

374. “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

375. “It’s been a while since someone reminded him of the difference between being wicked because one has to be or because one can.”

— Fredrik Backman

376. “The slightly porky man on the other side of the Plexiglas has back-combed hair and arms covered in tattoos. As if it isn’t enough to look like someone has slapped a pack of margarine over his head, he has to cover himself in doodles as well. There’s not even a proper motif, as far as Ove can see, just a lot of patterns. Is that something an adult person in a healthy state of mind would consent to? Going about with his arms looking like a pair of pajamas?”

— Fredrik Backman

377. “Perhaps one day he’ll find words for that feeling of being different. How physical it is. Exclusion is a form of exhaustion that eats its way into your skeleton. People who are like everyone else, who belong to the norm, the majority, can’t possibly understand it.”

— Fredrik Backman

378. “She remembered when she used to read bedtime stories to the children, and Peter Pan declaring: “To die will be an awfully big adventure.” Maybe for the person doing it, Estelle thought, but not for the one who was left behind. All that awaited her were a thousand sunrises where life is a beautiful prison.”

— Fredrik Backman

379. “Everything she has held back, everything she has tried to stifle, everything she has tried not to show in order to protect the people she loves, to stop them having to feel as much pain as her. She can’t bear their pain as well. She can’t handle the weight of other people’s sorrow on top of this.”

— Fredrik Backman

380. “So when a fat lady who looks like she’s combed her hair with a toaster starts reading poems, Elsa thinks it’s just about enough and she pushes her way out between the pews.”

— Fredrik Backman

381. “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

382. “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

383. “People of Granny’s age describe Wikipedia as ‘an encyclopaedia, but on the net!’ Encyclopaedias are what Elsa describes as ‘Wikipedia, but analogue.”

— Fredrik Backman

384. “Disappointment with our children is always just disappointment with ourselves, and nothing has a longer braking distance than that.”

— Fredrik Backman

385. “That’s what fathers do, they sit in front of their sons and tell their son’s stories to a third person rather than letting them speak for themselves.”

— Fredrik Backman

386. “I buy distance from other people.”

— Fredrik Backman

387. “So even Sune finds himself wondering: what are principles worth, if you don’t win?”

— Fredrik Backman

388. “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

389. “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

390. “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

391. “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

392. “The very worst events in life have that effect on a family: we always remember, more sharply than anything else, the last happy moment before everything fell apart. The second before the crash, the ice-cream at the gas station just before the accident, the last swim on holiday before we came home and received the diagnosis. Our memories always force us back to those very best moments.”

— Fredrik Backman

393. “But sorrow is unreliable in that way. When people don’t share it there’s a good chance that it will drive them apart instead.”

— Fredrik Backman

394. “One of the plainest truths about both towns and individuals is that they usually don’t turn into what we tell them to be, but what they are told they are.”

— Fredrik Backman

395. “Mom. You taught me that I don’t have to have dreams. I can have goals.”

— Fredrik Backman

396. “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

397. “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

398. “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

399. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman