Top 500 Fredrik Backman Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “ZARA: I run a bank.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

403. “But she doesn’t want to disappoint him, so she stays quiet. Because you hardly ever disappoint anybody if you just stay quiet.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

405. “They were happy, or at least as happy as a family can be when it’s burdened by a grief too large to be absorbed by time.”

— Fredrik Backman

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

411. “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

412. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

414. “But perhaps, though, you’ve been in love? Almost everyone has, after all. And love can make you do quite a lot of ridiculous things. Getting married, for instance. Having children, playing happy families, and having a happy marriage. Or you might think that, anyway. Not happy, perhaps, but plausible.”

— Fredrik Backman

415. “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

416. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

418. “But, dear God, you haven’t lacked a role model. All your best qualities come from the fact that you’ve been raised in a house full of women.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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. The teacher has always been told she’s too young for this. Too attractive. That they won’t respect her. Those boys have been told that they’re bears, winners, immortal.”

— Fredrik Backman

428. “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

429. “People said he was bitter. Maybe they were right. He’d never reflected much on it. People also called him antisocial. Ove assumed this meant he wasn’t overly keen on people. And in this instance he could totally agree with them. More often than not people were out of their minds.”

— Fredrik Backman

430. “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

431. “An entrepreneur who isn’t moving isn’t actually standing still, he’s going backward.”

— Fredrik Backman

432. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

434. “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

435. “I buy distance from other people.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

437. “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

438. “She was fifteen and had access to the Internet; she already knew that the world is a cruel place if you’re a girl. Her parents couldn’t imagine that this could happen, but Maya simply hadn’t expected it to happen to her.”

— Fredrik Backman

439. “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

440. “Sometimes you have to laugh at the crap, that’s how you make it bearable.”

— Fredrik Backman

441. “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

442. “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

443. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

445. “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

446. “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

447. “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

448. “A lion among bears.”

— Fredrik Backman

449. “There’s a constant threat of violence hidden just beneath the surface of a certain type of person in this town that Peter never noticed when he was growing up, but which struck him all the more plainly after he came home from Canada.”

— Fredrik Backman

450. “Because all seven-year-olds deserve superheroes. And anyone who doesn’t agree needs their head examined.”

— Fredrik Backman