Top 500 Fredrik Backman Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “Only best friends know that stuff about each other. Only two boys who once lay side by side under the covers, reading comics by flashlight and realizing that the reason they always felt like outsiders was because they were superheroes.”

— Fredrik Backman

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

375. “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

376. “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

377. “There’s something romantic about the thought of all the apartments that aren’t for sale.”

— Fredrik Backman

378. “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

379. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

381. “Politics is an endless series of negotiations and compromises, and even if the processes are often complicated, the foundations are always simple: everyone wants to be paid, one way or another, so most parts of all bureaucratic systems work the same way: give me something, and I’ll give you something. That’s how we build civilizations.”

— Fredrik Backman

382. “You miss the strangest things when you lose someone. Little things. Smiles. The way she turned over in her sleep. Even repainting a room for her.”

— Fredrik Backman

383. “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

384. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

386. “Death does that to us, it’s like a phone call, you always remember exactly what you should have said the moment you hang up. Now there’s just an answering machine full of memories at the other end, fragments of a voice that are getting weaker and weaker.”

— Fredrik Backman

387. “It’s hard to tell exactly when a person’s substance abuse begins, which is why everyone is lying when they say: “I’ve got it under control.” Drugs are a sort of dusk that grant us the illusion that we’re the ones who decide when the light goes out, but that power never belongs to us. The darkness takes us whenever it likes.”

— Fredrik Backman

388. “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

389. “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

390. “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

391. “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

392. “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

393. “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

394. “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

395. “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

396. “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

397. “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

398. “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

399. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman