Top 500 Fredrik Backman Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Guilt is always stronger than logic.”

— Fredrik Backman

352. “Two people who have loved each for long enough eventually seem to stop touching each other consciously, it becomes something instinctive; when they meet between the hall and kitchen, their bodies somehow find each other. When they walk through a door, her hand ends up in his as if by accident. Tiny collisions, every day, all the time. Impossible to construct. So when they disappear, no one knows why, but suddenly two people are living parallel lives instead of together.”

— Fredrik Backman

353. “I was born here but I’ve never gotten used to it; Helsingborg and I will never find peace. Maybe everyone feels that way about their hometown: the place we’re from never apologizes, never admits that it was wrong about us. It just sits there, at the end of the motorway, whispering: “You might be all rich and powerful now. And maybe you do come home with expensive watches and fancy clothes. But you can’t fool me, because I know who you really are. You’re just a scared little boy.”

— Fredrik Backman

354. “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

355. “Some children never quite manage to escape their parents; they’re guided by their compass, see through their eyes. When terrible things happen, most people become waves, but some people become rocks. Waves are tossed back and forth when the wind comes, but the rocks just take a beating, immovable, waiting for the storm to blow over.”

— Fredrik Backman

356. “And let me tell you something, my darling boy: I don’t need any men. I don’t need a man to drive me in a big car to the rink each morning, and I don’t need a man to give me a new job that I don’t want. I don’t need a man to pay my bills, and I don’t need a man to tell me what I can think and feel and believe. I only need one man: my son. And you’re not alone. You’ve never been alone. You just need to be better at choosing the company you keep.”

— Fredrik Backman

357. “Ove stomped forward. The cat stood up. Ove stopped. They stood there measuring each other up for a few moments, like two potential troublemakers in a small-town bar. Ove considered throwing one of his clogs at it. The cat looked as if it regretted not bringing its own clogs to lob back.”

— Fredrik Backman

358. “It’s never only a dog. It’s family.”

— Fredrik Backman

359. “Ove has been a grumpy old man since the first day of second grade.”

— Fredrik Backman

360. “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

361. “There are people who say that children don’t behave the way adults tell them to, but the way they see adults behave. Perhaps that’s true. But children live the way adults tell them to a fair bit as well.”

— Fredrik Backman

362. “Death is the ultimate state of powerlessness. Powerlessness is the ultimate despair.”

— Fredrik Backman

363. “Because we’re doing the best we can, we really are. We’re trying to be grown-up and love each other and understand how the hell you’re supposed to insert USB leads. We’re looking for something to cling on to, something to fight for, something to look forward to. We’re doing all we can to teach our children how to swim. We have all of this in common, yet most of us remain strangers, we never know what we do to each other, how your life is affected by mine.”

— Fredrik Backman

364. “Over and over again, they have the same quiet argument with themselves and each other because Ana knows it’s an unreasonable demand to make of another person: that Maya of all people should feel some sort of responsibility for anyone else right now. That she of all people should stand up and shout in the quietest town in the world. Scare the animals.”

— Fredrik Backman

365. “People sometimes say that sorrow is mental but longing is physical. One is a wound, the other an amputated limb, a withered petal compared to a snapped stem. Anything that grows closely enough to what it loves will eventually share the same roots.”

— Fredrik Backman

366. “Sometimes good people do terrible things in the belief that they’re trying to protect what they love.”

— Fredrik Backman

367. “But you can never fool dogs. They know all that’s best in you.”

— Fredrik Backman

368. “She could see winter making itself comfortable across the town. She liked the silence of this time of year, but had never appreciated its smugness. When the snow arrives autumn has already done all the work, taking care of all the leaves and carefully sweeping summer away from people’s memories. All winter had to do was roll in with a bit of freezing weather and take all the credit, like a man who’s spent twenty minutes next to a barbecue but has never served a full meal in his life.”

— Fredrik Backman

369. “The husband just nods back at her with an indescribably harmonious smile. The very sort of smile that makes decent folk want to slap Buddhist monks in the face, Ove thinks to himself.”

— Fredrik Backman

370. “You only need one ray of light to chase all the shadows away,” she said to him once, when he asked her why she had to be so upbeat the whole time.”

— Fredrik Backman

371. “How the heck are you supposed to have a reasonable conversation with someone who buys a BMW?”

— Fredrik Backman

372. “Hockey is just a silly little game. We devote year after year after year to it without ever really hoping to get anything in return. We burn and bleed and cry, fully aware that the most the sport can give us, in the very best scenario, is incomprehensibly meager and worthless: just a few isolated moments of transcendence. That’s all.”

— Fredrik Backman

373. “Sonja used to say that Ove had only admitted he was wrong on one occasion in all the years they had been married, and that was in the early 1980s after he’d agreed with her about something that later turned out to be incorrect. Ove himself maintained that this was a lie, a damned lie. By definition he had only admitted that she was wrong, not that he was.”

— Fredrik Backman

374. “How big is the world when you’re twelve years old? Both infinite and infinitesimal. It’s all your wildest dreams, but it’s also a cramped locker room in an ice rink.”

— Fredrik Backman

375. “Perhaps one day the man in the black jacket will think about this too: why he only wondered if it was Kevin or Amat who was telling the truth. Why Maya’s word wasn’t enough.”

— Fredrik Backman

376. “One day, Zach, you’ll have more money and influence than all those bastards. And then you’ll do great things. Because you know how much it hurts to have no power. So you won’t hurt them, even though you could. And that will make the world a better place.”

— Fredrik Backman

377. “Then Mum died. And Dad grew even quieter. As if she took away with her the few words he’d possessed.”

— Fredrik Backman

378. “Never go to a game of anything and shout, “You’re playing like a woman!” at an athlete, as though that word were the definition of weakness. One day, you’ll be holding a woman’s hand as she gives birth and then that’ll make you feel more ashamed than you’ve ever felt about anything. Words matter. Be better.”

— Fredrik Backman

379. “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

380. “Nothing in the world is so irresistibly contagious as laughter and food humor. Then she thought about and American author who had written that loneliness is like starvation, you don’t realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.”

— Fredrik Backman

381. “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

382. “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

383. “Elsa had looked back at the girl in the only way one can look back at someone who has just pointed at a Gryffindor scarf and said, “Ugly bloody scarf.” Not totally dissimilar to how one would look at someone who had just seen a horse and gaily burst out, “Crocodile!”

— Fredrik Backman

384. “He misses her so much that sometimes he can’t bear existing in his own body.”

— Fredrik Backman

385. “One of all the terrible effects of grief is that we interpret its absence as egotism.”

— Fredrik Backman

386. “Soccer forces life to move on. There’s always a new match. A new season. There’s always a dream that everything can get better. It’s a game of wonders.”

— Fredrik Backman

387. “I’m blunt and sharp and full of black and white. She’s all my colour.”

— Fredrik Backman

388. “It’s hardly surprising that people get confused and society is going to the dogs when it’s full of caffeine-free coffee, gluten-free bread, alcohol-free beer.”

— Fredrik Backman

389. “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

390. “ZARA: I run a bank.”

— Fredrik Backman

391. “You might be playing with bears. But that doesn’t mean you have to forget that you’re a lion.”

— Fredrik Backman

392. “Men are busy, but boys don’t stop growing. Sons want their fathers’ attention until the precise moment when fathers want their sons’.”

— Fredrik Backman

393. “When you’re a child you long to be an adult and decide everything for yourself, but when you’re an adult you realize that’s the worst part of it.”

— Fredrik Backman

394. “A human being may not choose her circumstances, but she does choose her actions.”

— Fredrik Backman

395. “The hardest thing about trusting teenagers is the fact that we used to be teenagers ourselves.”

— Fredrik Backman

396. “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

397. “Maybe you feel like telling me about Hanoi 1902, when the city tried to fight a plague of rats by offering the inhabitants a reward for every rat they killed and whose tail they handed over to the police. And what did that lead to? People started breeding rats! Do you have any idea how many men have told me that story to illustrate how selfish and untrustworthy ordinary people are?”

— Fredrik Backman

398. “A funeral can go on for weeks, because few events in life are a better opportunity to tell stories.”

— Fredrik Backman

399. “Everyone is always negotiating, all of the time. You’re doing the deal of your life, every day. This was mine.”

— Fredrik Backman

400. “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