Top 500 Fredrik Backman Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “And then she left him alone in a world where he no longer understood the language.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

403. “Parents are defined by their mistakes.” Do you think this statement is true?”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

405. “The older man thinks the most important thing is for a police officer to do the right thing, the younger thinks it’s more important to do things correctly.”

— Fredrik Backman

406. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

408. “Unfortunately I think most people would still get more sympathy from their colleagues and bosses at work if they show up looking rough one morning and say ‘I’m hungover’ than if they say ‘I’m suffering from anxiety.”

— Fredrik Backman

409. “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

410. “The rules? Is that what you were about to say? You don’t make the rules, you just play the game?” Zara interrupted wearily, seeing as she’d rather drink nitroglycerin and go on a trampoline than have to listen to yet another man lecturing her about financial responsibilities.”

— Fredrik Backman

411. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

413. “All children are victims of their parents’ childhoods, because all adults try to give their kids what they themselves enjoyed or lacked.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

415. “They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves.”

— Fredrik Backman

416. “You can’t live in this town, Maya, you can only survive it.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

418. “But children are the only people who don’t have to take responsibility for anyone but themselves. The rest of us have to take responsibility for the things we cause to happen. 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

419. “He’s a team player – that’s how he would describe himself. And the starting point for that is always understanding your own role, and its limitations.”

— Fredrik Backman

420. “People used to shout, “stand up like a real man,” in every possible context when I was a teenager. It took me a good few years into my twenties to realize that real men can also stay seated, shut up, and listen. And admit when they’re wrong.”

— Fredrik Backman

421. “He can’t understand people who long to retire. How can anyone spend their whole life longing for the day when they become superfluous? Wandering about, a burden on society, what sort of man would ever wish for that? Staying at home, waiting to die. Or even worse: waiting for them to come and fetch you and put you in a home. Being dependent on other people to get to the toilet.”

— Fredrik Backman

422. “I gave my change to him,” says Parvaneh, with a nod at the man with the dirty beard by the house wall. “You know he’ll only spend it on schnapps,” Ove states. Parvaneh opens her eyes wide with something Ove strongly suspects to be sarcasm. “Really? Will he? And I was sooo hoping he would use it to pay off his student loans from his university education in particle physics!”

— Fredrik Backman

423. “People want to be good. Deep down. Kind. The problem of course is that it isn’t always possible to be kind to idiots, because they’re idiots. That’s become a lifelong project for Nadia to grapple with, as it is for all of us.”

— Fredrik Backman

424. “When something goes right for a team everything feels easy, so it automatically goes even better. But if you can cause a bit of trouble for them, only a very little bit, you’ll soon see that they manage to create a lot more trouble for themselves.”

— Fredrik Backman

425. “It took chaos to set him free, loneliness to stop him being alone.”

— Fredrik Backman

426. “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

427. “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

428. “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

429. “And Ove realized that he wanted to hear her talking about the things she loved for the rest of his life.”

— Fredrik Backman

430. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

432. “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

433. “Life is a weird thing. We spend all our time trying to manage different aspects of it, yet we are still largely shaped by things that happen beyond our control.”

— Fredrik Backman

434. “You don’t fool me, darling,“she said with a playful little smile and crept into his big arms. “You’re dancing on the inside, Ove, when no one’s watching. And I’ll always love you for that. Whether you like it or not.”

— Fredrik Backman

435. “I’ll bring you to the Land-of-Almost-Awake, and we’ll eat dreams and dance and laugh and cry and be brave and forgive people, and we’ll fly with the cloud animals and Granny will be sitting on a bench in Miasmas, smoking and waiting for us.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

437. “Sometimes we have to get rid of stuff to make room for new stuff, and then we start to miss the old stuff so much that we have to build new stuff that pretends to be the old stuff.”

— Fredrik Backman

438. “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

439. “Because he was always the sort of person who stood in the way, the sort who protected, the sort who ran. He always thought he was the bad guy in all stories, the real heroes always do, that’s why stories about boys like him never end with them growing old.”

— Fredrik Backman

440. “Why do you want to climb Mount Everest?” The mountaineer replied in bemusement, as if the question was ridiculous and the answer obvious, “Because it’s there.” Kira understood then, because why had she wanted to go to university when no one else in her family had been? Why had she chosen law when everyone had told her it would be too hard? Why? To find out if she could do it. Because she wanted to climb that damn mountain. Because it was there.”

— Fredrik Backman

441. “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

442. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

444. “It’s just that Sune is no longer sure that’s all a hockey team should consist of: boys who never lose.”

— Fredrik Backman

445. “He never understood why she chose him. She loved abstract things like music and books and strange words. Ove was a man filled entirely with tangible things. He liked screwdrivers and oil filters. He went through life with his hands firmly shoved in his pockets. She danced.”

— Fredrik Backman

446. “All marriages have their bad sides, because people have weaknesses. If you live with another human being you learn to handle these weaknesses in a variety of ways. For instance, you might take the view that weaknesses are a bit like heavy pieces of furniture, and based on this you must learn to clean around them. To maintain the illusion.”

— Fredrik Backman

447. “When it comes to terror, reality’s got nothing on the power of the imagination.”

— Fredrik Backman

448. “That may have been how they survived, Kira realizes: thanks to their ability not to fall apart at the same time.”

— Fredrik Backman

449. “Everyone is someone else’s Stockholmer, I guess.”

— Fredrik Backman

450. “You don’t have to like all children. Just one. And children don’t need the world’s best parents, just their own parents. To be perfectly honest with you, what they need most of the time is a chauffeur.”

— Fredrik Backman