Top 500 Fredrik Backman Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 9 of 10

401. “God took a child from me, darling Ove. But he gave me a thousand others.”

— Fredrik Backman

402. “Over time she realized that deep down almost everyone asks themselves the same sort of questions: Am I good? Do I make anyone proud? Am I useful to society? Am I good at my job? Generous and considerate? A decent shag? Does anyone want me to be their friend? Have I been a good parent? Am I a good person?”

— Fredrik Backman

403. “He works with care. Straight lines, even edges. People don’t shovel snow that way anymore. Nowadays they just clear a way, they use snowblowers and all sorts of things. Any old method will do, scattering snow all over the place.”

— Fredrik Backman

404. “They always are, but when politics work in our favor we call it “cooperation,” and when it favors others we call it “corruption.” Peter looks out of the window. There are always flags raised in front of the council building so the bastards inside can see which way the wind is blowing.”

— Fredrik Backman

405. “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

406. “I heard a man who worked in a casino say that no one gets ruined by losing, they get ruined by trying to win back the money they lost. Is that what you mean? Is that.”

— Fredrik Backman

407. “We probably make all the same mistakes that your generation did. Just different versions of them.”

— Fredrik Backman

408. “We open our eyes in the morning and life is just waiting to tip a fresh avalanche of “Don’t Forget!”s and “Remember!”s over us. We don’t have time to think or breathe, we just wake up and start digging through the heap, because there will be another one dumped on us tomorrow.”

— Fredrik Backman

409. “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

410. “Falling in love with a place and falling in love with a person are related adventures. At first we run around street corners giggling and explore every inch of each other’s skin, over the years we get to know every cobblestone and strand of hair and snore, and the waters of time soften our passion into unfailing love, and in the end the eyes we wake up next to and the horizon outside our window are the same thing: home.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

413. “You can’t live long with the ones who are only beautiful, Jules. But the funny ones, oh, they last a lifetime.”

— Fredrik Backman

414. “Her laughter catches him off guard. As if it’s carbonated and someone has poured it too fast and it’s bubbling over in all directions. It doesn’t fit at all with the gray cement and right-angled garden paving stones. It’s an untidy, mischievous laugh that refuses to go along with rules and prescriptions.”

— Fredrik Backman

415. “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

416. “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

417. “Even astonishingly late in life, people seem incapable of considering that their parents might not be super-smart and really funny and immortal. Perhaps there’s a biological reason for that, that up to a certain age a child loves you unconditionally and hopelessly for one single reason: you’re theirs.”

— Fredrik Backman

418. “It stuck with Jim that today’s youngsters had far too much choice, that was the whole problem – if all those modern dating apps had existed when Jims’ wife first met him, she would never have ended up becoming his wife. If you’re constantly presented with alternatives, you can never make up your mind, Jim thought.”

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

420. “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

421. “They’re fifteen and seventeen years old, and in ten years’ time they’ll remember this evening, when all the others were inside having a party, and they stood out here and became friends.”

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

— Fredrik Backman

425. “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

426. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

428. “Maya goes into the bathroom and looks at herself in the mirror. Astonished at how strong she has learned to pretend to be. At the number of secrets she can hold.”

— Fredrik Backman

429. “If anyone asked her to sum up her view of the world, she always quoted Martin Luther: “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”

— Fredrik Backman

430. “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

431. “They hold each other’s hands. Sit beside each other in bed and count sleeping pills, wondering how many it would take to end their lives. When they were children, everything was different. It feels like only yesterday because it was.”

— Fredrik Backman

432. “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

433. “And then she left him alone in a world where he no longer understood the language.”

— Fredrik Backman

434. “They live in the same house but his parents barely see him, he’s fourteen now, meaning that they no longer have a child but a lodger.”

— Fredrik Backman

435. “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

436. “Even in a town that’s covered with snow three-quarters of the year, it’s unbearably cold standing in the shade of someone who’s a bit more popular than you are.”

— 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. “ZARA: I run a bank.”

— Fredrik Backman

439. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

441. “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

442. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

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

— Fredrik Backman

445. “Some children never quite manage to escape their parents; they’re guided by their compass, see through their eyes. When terrible things happen, most people become waves, but some people become rocks. Waves are tossed back and forth when the wind comes, but the rocks just take a beating, immovable, waiting for the storm to blow over.”

— Fredrik Backman

446. “One of the hardest things about getting old is admitting mistakes that it’s too late to put right. The worst thing about having power over other people’s lives is that you sometimes get things wrong.”

— Fredrik Backman

447. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman

449. “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

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

— Fredrik Backman