Top 500 Fredrik Backman Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “One of the most human things about anxiety is that we try to cure chaos with chaos.”

— Fredrik Backman

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

409. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

411. “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

412. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

415. “I buy distance from other people.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

422. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

428. “A lion among bears.”

— Fredrik Backman

429. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

431. “Sometimes I don’t think I’m ready for the responsibility – I mean, I think my phone is asking too much of me when it wants me to install an update, and I find myself yelling: ‘You’re suffocating me.’ You can’t shout that at a child. And children have to be updated all the time, because they can kill themselves just crossing the street or eating a peanut! I’ve mislaid my phone three times already today, I don’t know if I’m ready for a human being.”

— Fredrik Backman

432. “I’ve done what I can to teach you to never feel threatened by strong women. I married the strongest one I’ve ever met.”

— Fredrik Backman

433. “Elsa heard one of the doctors at Mum’s hospital saying that Granny “could start a fight in an empty room,” but when Elsa told Granny she just looked miffed and said, “What if it was the room that started it?”

— Fredrik Backman

434. “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

435. “When God took her anyway, Jack went into her bed, held her hand too hard in his, as if he were hoping she might wake up and tell him off. Then he whispered disconsolately: “Don’t worry, Mom, I’ll take care of Dad.”

— Fredrik Backman

436. “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

437. “The end of life is as unstoppable as its beginning, we can’t stop the first and last breaths we take any more than we can stop the wind.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

439. “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

440. “I want you to always remember that you can become whatever you want to become, but that’s nowhere near as important as knowing that you can be exactly who you are. I hope I was just the dysfunctional prototype. I hope you tell me a million times over what an idiot I am.”

— Fredrik Backman

441. “We tried keeping tropical fish once and they all died. And we really don’t know more about children than tropical fish, so the responsibility frightens the life out of us each morning. We don’t have a plan, we just do our best to get through the day, because there’ll be another one coming along tomorrow.”

— Fredrik Backman

442. “Because not all monsters were monsters in the beginning. Some are monsters born of sorrow... not all monsters look like monsters. There are some that carry their monstrosity inside.”

— Fredrik Backman

443. “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

444. “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

445. “My wife had a terrible sense of humor as well. She liked laughing and causing trouble. The older she got, the more trouble she was. She always told me I was too nice. That’s a terrible thing to be told by a priest, isn’t it?”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

447. “And when you’re standing there, in the storage section at IKEA, don’t focus too much on the furniture. Focus on the fact that you’ve actually found someone who can see themselves storing their crap in the same place as your crap. Because, hand on heart: you have a lot of crap.”

— Fredrik Backman

448. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

450. “I don’t want to lose you again. I couldn’t go on.”

— Fredrik Backman