Top 100 Fredrik Backman Quotes
#1. Sometimes the safest place is when you flee to what seems the most dangerous," said Granny, and then she described how the prince rode right into the darkest forest and the shadows stopped, hissing, at the edge.
Fredrik Backman
#2. It doesn't take long to persuade each other to stop seeing a person as a person. And when enough people are quiet for long enough, a handful of voices can give the impression that everyone is screaming.
Fredrik Backman
#3. Never again do you find friends like the ones you have when you're fifteen years old.
Fredrik Backman
#4. Soccer forces life to move on. There's always a new match. A new season. There's always a dream that everything can get better. It's a game of wonders.
Fredrik Backman
#5. You never want to get away from home as much as you do when you're fifteen years old. It's like her mom usually says when the cold and darkness have worn away at her patience and she's had three or four glasses of wine :"you can't live in this town,maya,you can only survive it.
Fredrik Backman
#6. 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
#8. She stood in front of him with January in her hair and he was lost.
Fredrik Backman
#9. All the best people are different -look at superheroes. After all, if superpowers were normal, everyone would have them.
Fredrik Backman
#10. Bitterness can be corrosive. It can rewrite your memories as if it were scrubbing a crime scene clean, until in the end you only remember what suits you of its causes.
Fredrik Backman
#11. Humanity has many shortcomings, but none is stronger than pride.
Fredrik Backman
#13. Ove is the sort of man who checks the status of all things by giving them a good kick. He
Fredrik Backman
#14. A time like that comes for every man, when he chooses what sort of man he wants to be. And if you don't know the story, you don't know the man.
Fredrik Backman
#15. And where was the world going if people couldn't even write or brew a pot of coffee?
Fredrik Backman
#16. The cat gives him a judgemental stare ,as if it's sitting on the decision-making side if the desk at a job interview.
Fredrik Backman
#18. Of all the imaginable things he most misses about her, the thing he really wishes he could do again is hold her hand in his.
Fredrik Backman
#19. Miplorisians believe that the inner voices are those of the dead coming back to help their loved ones.
Fredrik Backman
#20. Toad, who happens to have the ball at that moment, doesn't seem to think it's a very good idea. But then Omar utters those golden words that have the magical power to obliterate every child's self-restraint anywhere in the world: "You don't have the guts to do it!
Fredrik Backman
#21. But we are always optimists when it comes to time; we think there will be time to do things with other people. And time to say things to them.
Fredrik Backman
#22. The towers of removal boxes throw shadows across the hall, like monuments to everything that is now absent
Fredrik Backman
#23. I don't want Elsa to know that I am going to die because all seven-year-olds deserve superheroes, Marcel. And one of their superpowers ought to be that they can't get cancer.
Fredrik Backman
#24. The very sort of smile that makes decent folk want to slap Buddhist monks in the face,
Fredrik Backman
#27. They sat at the back, each of them staring at a patch on the floor until it was over. and in all honesty, they spent more time missing Ove's mum than thinking about God.
Fredrik Backman
#28. If you can be heard then you exist, mutters hungover Bank, massaging her temples.
Fredrik Backman
#29. If you have a dad who supports Liverpool you always fucking think you can turn anything around. You know! Ever since that Champions League final.
Fredrik Backman
#30. Anxiety can act as internal gravity, shrinking the soul.
Fredrik Backman
#31. Rune never said anything about it. But to anyone who had known him a long time, it was as if he grew a few centimetres shorter in the years that followed. As if he sort of crumpled with a deep sigh and never really breathed properly again.
Fredrik Backman
#32. if a sufficient number of people are different, no one has to be normal. In
Fredrik Backman
#33. But how is it your team if you don't play in it?" The boy thinks this over for a moment. Then he seems to take a firm grip on the ball. "We've supported this team for longer than most of the players in it. So it's more our team than theirs." "Preposterous," snorts Britt-Marie. In
Fredrik Backman
#34. To teach her that not all monsters are monsters in the beginning, and not all monsters look like monsters. Some carry their monstrosity inside.
Fredrik Backman
#35. Normal life is presentable. In normal life, you clean up the kitchen and keep your balcony tidy and take care of your children. It's hard work
harder than one might think.
Fredrik Backman
#36. Death's greatest power is not that it can make people die, but that it can make people want to stop living.
Fredrik Backman
#37. The three-year-old looked as if she was ready to try to hug the cat. The cat looked as if it was ready to pick out the three-year-old from a lineup at a police station. Ove
Fredrik Backman
#38. Many of them have insanely weird clothes, as if they've been playing outfit roulette with someone who can't read washing instruction tags.
Fredrik Backman
#39. Elsa sobs as she unfolds it, the way one sobs when the tears have run out but not the crying.
Fredrik Backman
#40. Tell me about school, NoahNoah," the old man says..."Our teacher made us write a story about what we want to be when we're big," Noah tells him. "What did you write?""I wrote that I wanted to concentrate on being little first.
Fredrik Backman
#41. If you hate the one who hates, you could risk becoming like the one you hate.
Fredrik Backman
#42. A simple truth, repeated as often as it is ignored, is that if you tell a child it can do absolutely anything, or that it can't do anything at all, you will in all likelihood be proven right.
Fredrik Backman
#43. George used to say that Granny wasn't a time-optimist, she was a time-atheist, and the only religion she believed in was Do-It-Later-Buddhism.
Fredrik Backman
#44. When it comes to terror, reality's got nothing on the power of the imagination[.]
Fredrik Backman
#45. You have to understand that when one is just standing there looking, then just for a second one is ready to jump. If one does it, one dares to do it. But if one waits, it'll never happen.
Fredrik Backman
#46. She will never understand how some people can prefer other people to animals.
Fredrik Backman
#47. 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
#48. That was the best thing about the house. It was never finished. There was always a screw somewhere for Ove to tighten. On
Fredrik Backman
#49. In the beginning the queen had been a courageous and fair-minded princess very much liked by all, but unfortunately she grew up and became a frightened adult, as adults tend to be. She started loving efficiency and avoiding conflict. As adults do.
Fredrik Backman
#50. All over her face and sunglasses so big that one can't tell whether they're a pair of glasses or some kind of helmet.
Fredrik Backman
#51. Children need the lie to be brave enough to sleep in their beds; parents need it to be able to get up the next morning.
Fredrik Backman
#52. It's only a game. It only resolves tiny, insignificant things. Such as who gets validation. Who gets listened to. It allocates power and draws boundaries and turns some people into stars and others into spectators. That's all.
Fredrik Backman
#53. You were never easy, darling difficult sulky you, never diplomatic. You might even have been easy to dislike at times. But no one, absolutely no one, would dare tell me you were hard to love.
Fredrik Backman
#55. Just everything else, Mum. I just have everything else from you.
Fredrik Backman
#56. Granny said there was a law about having to eat Pizza at Christmas. Granny was full of nonsense, of course, but [Elsa] went along with it because she likes pizza. And Christmas food kind of sucks if you are a vegetarian.
Fredrik Backman
#57. You should choose your battles if you can, but if the battle chooses you then kick the sod in his fuse box!
Fredrik Backman
#58. Religion is something between you and other people; it's full of interpretations and theories and opinions. But faith . . . that's just between you and God.
Fredrik Backman
#60. It's complicated."
"Yes, until someone explains it to you!
Fredrik Backman
#61. It doesn't take a lot to be able to let go of your child. It takes everything.
Fredrik Backman
#62. And they do what they can. Try to learn to live with themselves, try to live rather than just existing.
Fredrik Backman
#63. At a certain age almost all the questions a person asks him or herself are really just about one thing: how should you live your life?
Fredrik Backman
#64. Maybe their sorrow over children that never came should have brought the two men closer. 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
#65. That time Rune drove a Volvo, but later he bought a BMW. You just couldn't reason with a person who behaved like that.
Fredrik Backman
#66. But one good thing with your brain being sick is that you're going to be really good at keeping secrets. That's a good thing if you're a grandpa." Grandpa nods. "That's true, that's true . . . what was that?
Fredrik Backman
#67. No, she lies. Because she's polite enough to know that if someone gives you a book, you owe that person the pretense that you haven't read it.
Fredrik Backman
#68. His days passed like this, slow and methodical. And then one morning he saw her. She had brown hair and blue eyes and red shoes and a big yellow clasp in her hair.
And then there was no more peace and quiet for Ove.
Fredrik Backman
#69. neither of them forgave themselves for not being able to give the women they loved more than anything what they wanted more than anything.
Fredrik Backman
#70. Being a parent makes you feel like a blanket that's always too small. No matter how hard you try to cover everyone,
Fredrik Backman
#71. This town needs to win at something. We need to feel, just once, that we're best. I know it's a game. But that's not all it is. Not always.
Fredrik Backman
#72. And Maud bakes cookies, because when the darkness is too heavy to bear and too many things have been broken in too many ways to ever be fixed again, Maud doesn't know what weapon to use if one can't use dreams.
Fredrik Backman
#73. When a person gives to another person it's not just the receiver who's blessed. It's the giver. On
Fredrik Backman
#75. Every seven-year-old deserves a superhero. That's just how it is.
Fredrik Backman
#76. How the heck are you supposed to have a reasonable conversation with someone who buys a BMW?
Fredrik Backman
#77. What sort of love is it if you hand someone over when it gets difficult?" she cries, her voice shaking with sorrow. "Abandon someone when there's
Fredrik Backman
#78. Mom puts her hand on Elsa's hand, and inhales deeply from the point where they are touching, as if trying to fill her lungs with Elsa. As mums do with daughters who grow up too fast.
Fredrik Backman
#79. It's as if the whole house is missing Granny now. Not the people living in it, but the actual building.
Fredrik Backman
#80. Difficult questions, simple answers. What is a community?
It is the sum total of our choices.
Fredrik Backman
#81. You don't have to support Liverpool from the day you're born, Coach. You can learn to do it when you're grown up.
Fredrik Backman
#84. We don't beat people to death in this leaseholders' association.
Fredrik Backman
#85. Her head against his chest and whispered: We can busy ourselves with living or with dying, Ove. We have to move on.
Fredrik Backman
#86. He never understood why she chose him. She loved abstract things like music and books and strange words. Ove was a man filled entirely with tangible things. He liked screwdrivers and oil filters. He went through life with his hands firmly shoved in his pockets. She danced.
Fredrik Backman
#87. Then she leans forward and whispers, "Give my love to Sonja and thank her for the loan," into his ear.
Fredrik Backman
#88. Drinks at least twenty cups of coffee per day and always looks triumphantly
Fredrik Backman
#89. Sometimes things have to clear a space so something else can take its place.
Fredrik Backman
#90. Noahnoah, promise me something, one very last thing: once your good-bye is perfect, you have to leave me and not look back. Live your life. It's an awful thing to miss someone who's still here."
And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer
Fredrik Backman
#91. they don't want a modern Beartown, because they know that a modern Beartown won't want them. Ramona
Fredrik Backman
#92. Because you hardly ever disappoint anybody if you just stay quiet.
Fredrik Backman
#93. If anyone had asked him there and then if it was worth it, he would have whispered: "I don't know." Sometimes life doesn't let you choose your battles. Just the company you keep. He
Fredrik Backman
#94. Because not all monsters were monsters in the beginning. Some are monsters born of sorrow.
Fredrik Backman
#95. But, you know, do what you like! Have a million books! I was only, like, asking. It's still a book if you're reading it on an iPad. Soup is soup whatever bowl it's in.
Fredrik Backman
#98. It [the Audi] has those new wave-shaped headlights, Ove notes, presumably designed so that no one at night will be able to avoid the insight that here comes a car driven by an utter shit.
Fredrik Backman
#99. If you mix vanilla extract with baking soda, the refrigerator smells fresh.
Fredrik Backman
#100. It's just insane how much you swear, did anyone ever tell you that? My dad says it's a sign of a bad vocabulary.
Fredrik Backman
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