Top 500 Fredrik Backman Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Mothers and daughters know how to wound each other in totally unique ways, possibly because daughters often carry the guilt of their mothers’ consciences, until they end up arguing about sins that they haven’t even committed.”

— Fredrik Backman

352. “Everything seems obvious in hindsight!”

— Fredrik Backman

353. “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

354. “He loses himself in his own thoughts. Floats away, as if in a mist. He’s never been the sort of man who does that, has never been a daydreamer, but lately it’s as if something’s twisted up in his head. He’s having increasing difficulty concentrating on things. He doesn’t like it at all.”

— Fredrik Backman

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

360. “You never get the same kind of friends again like you have when you’re a teenager. Not even if you keep them your whole life. it will never be the same as it was then.”

— Fredrik Backman

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “Addicts are addicted to their drugs, and their families are addicted to hope.”

— Fredrik Backman

365. “God took a child from me, darling Ove. But he gave me a thousand others.”

— Fredrik Backman

366. “Over time she realized that deep down almost everyone asks themselves the same sort of questions: Am I good? Do I make anyone proud? Am I useful to society? Am I good at my job? Generous and considerate? A decent shag? Does anyone want me to be their friend? Have I been a good parent? Am I a good person?”

— Fredrik Backman

367. “He works with care. Straight lines, even edges. People don’t shovel snow that way anymore. Nowadays they just clear a way, they use snowblowers and all sorts of things. Any old method will do, scattering snow all over the place.”

— Fredrik Backman

368. “If she does everything right at work, things usually go as planned, but it doesn’t matter if she does absolutely everything in the universe correctly as a mother: the very worst can still happen.”

— Fredrik Backman

369. “I heard a man who worked in a casino say that no one gets ruined by losing, they get ruined by trying to win back the money they lost. Is that what you mean? Is that.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

374. “It’s so easy to get people to hate one another. That’s what makes love so impossible to understand. Hate is so simple that it always ought to win. It’s an uneven fight.”

— Fredrik Backman

375. “You never want to get away from home as much as you do when you’re fifteen years old. It’s like her mom usually says when the cold and darkness have worn away at her patience and she’s had three or four glasses of wine: “you can’t live in this town, Maya, you can only survive it.”

— Fredrik Backman

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

382. “It’s a terrible moment for all kids when we realise that our parents can’t protect us. That we won’t be able to protect our own. That the whole world can come and take us whenever it likes.”

— Fredrik Backman

383. “You seem to get caught up in a lot of disagreements, Zara. One technique I’d recommend is to ask yourself three questions before you flare up. One: Are the actions of the person in question intended to harm you personally? Two: Do you possess all the information about the situation? Three: Do you have anything to gain from a conflict?”

— Fredrik Backman

384. “You hate me now, but you were once mine.”

— Fredrik Backman

385. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

387. “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

388. “They never argue anymore, unless perhaps they argue all the time. 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

389. “It helps to know that you’re not alone when you’ve been left behind. You can’t carry the guilt and shame and the unbearable silence on your own, and you don’t have to.”

— Fredrik Backman

390. “And that laughter of hers, which, for the rest of his life, would make him feel as if someone was running around barefoot on the inside of his breast.”

— Fredrik Backman

391. “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

392. “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

393. “Because not all monsters were monsters in the beginning. Some are monsters born of sorrow.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

395. “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

396. “He’s invincibly strong and unbelievably fragile at one and the same time.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

398. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

400. “All passion is childish. It’s banal and naive. It’s nothing we learn; it’s instinctive, and so it overwhelms us. Overturns us. It bears us away in a flood. All other emotions belong to the earth, but passion inhabits the universe.”

— Fredrik Backman