Top 500 Fredrik Backman Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Boats that stay in the harbor are safe, sweetheart, but that’s not what boats were built for.”

— Fredrik Backman

2. “Culture isn’t just what we encourage but what we allow to happen.”

— Fredrik Backman

3. “Train hard, win easy.” “Team before individual.”

— Fredrik Backman

4. “It wasn’t your fault.”

— Fredrik Backman

5. “You don’t have to prove anything to anyone anymore. You’re good enough.”

— Fredrik Backman

6. “Everyone has their own struggle.”

— Fredrik Backman

7. “Having a grandmother is like having an army. This is a grandchild’s ultimate privilege: knowing that someone is on your side, always, whatever the details. Even when you are wrong. Especially then, in fact. A grandmother is both a sword and a shield.”

— Fredrik Backman

8. “A great deal is expected of anyone who’s been given a lot.”

— Fredrik Backman

9. “If you spend your whole life being someone else, who will be you?”

— Fredrik Backman

10. “Granny says people who think slowly always accuse quick thinkers of concentration problems. “Idiots can’t understand that non-idiots are done with a thought and already moving on to the next before they themselves have. That’s why idiots are always so scared and aggressive. Because nothing scares idiots more than a smart girl.”

— Fredrik Backman

11. “For me, culture is as much about what we encourage as what we actually permit.” David asked what he meant by that, and Sune replied: “That most people don’t do what we tell them to. They do what we let them get away with.”

— Fredrik Backman

12. “We’re bad losers, because a good loser is someone who’s used to losing!”

— Fredrik Backman

13. “He said that even if he knew that the world was going to hell tomorrow, he’d plant an apple tree today.”

— Fredrik Backman

14. “A long marriage is complicated. So complicated, in fact, that most people in one sometimes ask themselves: ‘Am I still married because I’m in love, or just because I can’t be bothered to let anyone else get to know me this well again?”

— Fredrik Backman

15. “But we weren’t ready to become adults. Someone should have stopped us.”

— Fredrik Backman

16. “There’s nothing wrong with being different. Granny said that only different people change the world.”

— Fredrik Backman

17. “Human beings are the only animals that smile as a gesture of peace, whereas other animals show their teeth as a threat. This is perfectly understandable now; she can see the animal inside the human being.”

— Fredrik Backman

18. “Culture is as much about what we encourage as what we permit.”

— Fredrik Backman

19. “You try to be a good parent, in every way, but you never know how. It’s not a difficult job. Just impossible.”

— Fredrik Backman

20. “Grief is a wild animal that drags us so far out into the darkness that we can’t imagine ever getting home again. Ever laughing again. It hurts in such a way that you can never really figure out if it actually passes or if you just get used to it.”

— Fredrik Backman

21. “You never have the sort of friends you have when you’re fifteen ever again. Even if you keep them for the rest of your life, it’s never the same as it was then.”

— Fredrik Backman

22. “Because life is all about the small margins.”

— Fredrik Backman

23. “To you who talk too much and sing too loud and cry too often and love something in life more than you should.”

— Fredrik Backman

24. “That most people don’t do what we tell them to. They do what we let them get away with.”

— Fredrik Backman

25. “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

26. “Team before self. Club before individual.”

— Fredrik Backman

27. “If you can’t depend on someone being on time, you shouldn’t trust them with anything more important either.”

— Fredrik Backman

28. “When Granny was headed for some far-off place, you could only be sure of one thing: that it was a place everyone else was trying to get away from. And if anyone asked her why she was doing it, she’d answer, “I’m a doctor, for God’s sake, and ever since I became one I’ve not allowed myself the luxury of choosing whose life I should be saving.”

— Fredrik Backman

29. “Do you remember what you always said when we went fishing on the island and slept in the tent? There’s nothing wrong with being a bit scared, you said, because if you wet yourself it’ll keep the bears away!”

— Fredrik Backman

30. “She suffers from being so organized – if you show you’re capable, you get even more to do, that’s the curse of being a smart girl.”

— Fredrik Backman

31. “This hurts too much to touch with words.”

— Fredrik Backman

32. “You can do a million things right, but if you do one single thing wrong you’re forever that parent who was checking his phone in the park when your child was.”

— Fredrik Backman

33. “We give those we love nicknames, because love requires a word that belongs to us alone.”

— Fredrik Backman

34. “Everyone has a thousand wishes before a tragedy, but just one afterward. When a child is born, its parents dream of it being as unique as possible, until it gets ill, when suddenly all they want is for everything to be normal.”

— Fredrik Backman

35. “Loving someone is like moving into a house. At first you fall in love with all the new things, then over the years the walls become weathered, the wood splinters here and there, and you start to love that house not so much because of all its perfection, but rather its imperfections.”

— Fredrik Backman

36. “Nothing must happen to you No, what am I saying Everything must happen to you And it must be wonderful Julia will give Estelle a completely.”

— Fredrik Backman

37. “If your head isn’t up to the job, your legs better be.”

— Fredrik Backman

38. “This hurts too much to touch with words. It was the man at the undertakers’ who showed the quotation to the Ovich sisters. “My favorite poet, Bodil Malmsten,” the man said, a little embarrassed at his own declaration of love. Now she’s the Ovich sisters’ favorite poet too.”

— Fredrik Backman

39. “He was a man of black and white. And she was color. All the color he had.”

— Fredrik Backman

40. “One of the last times she met her neighbor in the elevator he gave her a very thick book, written by a man. He had underlined one sentence, several hundred pages in: We are asleep until we fall in love. Estelle gave him a book in exchange, one written by a woman, so it didn’t need hundreds of pages to say things. Close to the start Estelle had underlined: Love is wanting you to exist.”

— Fredrik Backman

41. “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.”

— Fredrik Backman

42. “Expensive restaurants have bigger gaps between the tables. First class on airplanes has no middle seats. Exclusive hotels have separate entrances for guests staying in suites. The most expensive thing you can buy in the most densely populated places on the planet is distance.”

— Fredrik Backman

43. “The best friends of our childhoods are the loves of our lives, and they break our hearts in worse ways.”

— Fredrik Backman

44. “The only time I’m not moving forward is when I’m taking aim.”

— Fredrik Backman

45. “In Beartown silence always goes hand in hand with shame.”

— Fredrik Backman

46. “The path back to normal life is indescribably long once death has swept the feet out from under those of us who are left. Grief is a wild animal that drags us so far out into the darkness that we can’t imagine ever getting home again. Ever laughing again. It hurts in such a way that you can never really figure out if it actually passes or if you just get used to it.”

— Fredrik Backman

47. “Do you know what the worst thing about being a parent is? That you’re always judged by your worst moments... No one goes to see a psychologist to talk about all the times they weren’t hit in the head by a swing as a child. Parents are defined by their mistakes.”

— Fredrik Backman

48. “All children are victims of their parents’ childhoods, because all adults try to give their kids what they themselves enjoyed or lacked. In the end everything is either a revolt against the adults we encountered or an attempt to copy them.”

— Fredrik Backman

49. “The most expensive thing you can buy in the most densely populated places on the planet is distance.”

— Fredrik Backman

50. “Even if Kevin is no longer in Beartown, they still have to reclaim the things he stole. Twilight. Solitude. The courage to wear earbuds when it’s dark, the freedom to not look over your shoulder the whole time.”

— Fredrik Backman