Top 500 Fredrik Backman Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “It took chaos to set him free, loneliness to stop him being alone.”

— Fredrik Backman

402. “Once her mom slurred in her ear: “Personality is just the sum of our experiences. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. So don’t you worry, my little princess, you won’t get your heart broken because you come from a broken home. You won’t grow up to be a romantic, because children from broken homes don’t believe in everlasting love.”

— Fredrik Backman

403. “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

404. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

406. “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

407. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

409. “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

410. “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

411. “This was a world where one became outdated before one’s time was up. An entire country standing up and applauding the fact that no one was capable of doing anything properly anymore. The unreserved celebration of mediocrity.”

— Fredrik Backman

412. “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

413. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

415. “The assistant, a young man with a single-digit body mass index, looks ill at ease. He visibly struggles to control his urge to snatch the box out of Ove’s hands.”

— Fredrik Backman

416. “Perhaps one day the man in the black jacket will think about this too: why he only wondered if it was Kevin or Amat who was telling the truth. Why Maya’s word wasn’t enough.”

— Fredrik Backman

417. “Then Mum died. And Dad grew even quieter. As if she took away with her the few words he’d possessed.”

— Fredrik Backman

418. “You can love something without loving everything about it. You don’t have to feel embarrassed about not being proud. That applies to hockey, but it also applies to friends.”

— Fredrik Backman

419. “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

420. “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

421. “How the heck are you supposed to have a reasonable conversation with someone who buys a BMW?”

— Fredrik Backman

422. “Hockey is just a silly little game. We devote year after year after year to it without ever really hoping to get anything in return. We burn and bleed and cry, fully aware that the most the sport can give us, in the very best scenario, is incomprehensibly meager and worthless: just a few isolated moments of transcendence. That’s all.”

— Fredrik Backman

423. “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

424. “Sonja used to say that Ove had only admitted he was wrong on one occasion in all the years they had been married, and that was in the early 1980s after he’d agreed with her about something that later turned out to be incorrect. Ove himself maintained that this was a lie, a damned lie. By definition he had only admitted that she was wrong, not that he was.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

426. “One of all the terrible effects of grief is that we interpret its absence as egotism.”

— Fredrik Backman

427. “It’s such a nice brain, Grandpa,” Noah says encouragingly, because Grandma always said that whenever Grandpa goes quiet, you just have to give him a compliment to get him going again. “That’s nice of you.” Grandpa smiles and dries his eyes with the back of his hand. “A bit messy though.” The boy grins. “It rained for a long time here when your Grandma died. I never quite got it back in order after that.”

— Fredrik Backman

428. “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

429. “When you know someone is keeping secrets from you it makes you feel like an idiot, and no one likes feeling like an idiot. Mum.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

431. “It’s hardly surprising that people get confused and society is going to the dogs when it’s full of caffeine-free coffee, gluten-free bread, alcohol-free beer.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

433. “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

434. “Anything that grows closely enough to what it loves will eventually share the same roots. We can talk about loss, we can treat it and give it time, but biology still forces us to live according to certain rules: plants that are split down the middle don’t heal, they die.”

— Fredrik Backman

435. “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

436. “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

437. “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

438. “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

439. “All your best qualities come from the fact that you’ve been raised in a house full of women.”

— Fredrik Backman

440. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

442. “We always remember more sharply than anything else, the last happy moment before everything fell apart.”

— Fredrik Backman

443. “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

444. “What does it take to be a good parent? Not much. Just everything. Absolutely everything.”

— Fredrik Backman

445. “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

446. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

448. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

450. “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