Top 100 Backman Quotes
#1. Because you can be upset while you're eating chocolate Santas. But it's much, much, much more difficult.
Fredrik Backman
#2. He loves white cables. And white telephones. And white computer monitors with fruit on the back.
Fredrik Backman
#3. It's a grandmother's privilege never to have to show her grandchild who she was before she became a grandmother.
Fredrik Backman
#4. We love winners, even though they're very rarely particularly likeable people. They're almost always obsessive and selfish and inconsiderate. That doesn't matter. We forgive them. We like them while they're winning.
Fredrik Backman
#5. And then it goes as with all anger attacks. They don't just consist of one anger, but of many. A long series of angers, flung into a volcano in one's breast until it erupts.
Fredrik Backman
#6. Ove doubts whether someone who can't park a car properly should even be allowed to vote. When
Fredrik Backman
#7. Mum looks hesitant. As mums get when they are accustomed to being able to predict their daughters' questions, and then suddenly find they were wrong about that. Elsa shrugs.
Fredrik Backman
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. ...this would be my greatest fear: imagination giving up before the body does. I guess I'm not alone in this. Humans are a strange breed in the way our fear of getting old seems to be even greater than our fear of dying.
Fredrik Backman
#11. 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
#12. 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
#14. The whole house smells of Granny. There's something quite special about a granny's house. Even if ten or twenty or thirty years go by, you never forget how it smells.
Fredrik Backman
#15. They are both unfathomably complex, the pair of them, and that's why as different as they are, they understand each other. When
Fredrik Backman
#16. They stamp the slush off their boots with autopilot eyes and answering-machine voices while they wait for their drug of choice - caffeine or nicotine or sugar - to kick in and render their bodies at least tolerably functional until the first break. Out
Fredrik Backman
#17. Never again do you find friends like the ones you have when you're fifteen years old.
Fredrik Backman
#18. Culture. [...] That most people don't do what we tell them to do. They do what they can get away with.
Fredrik Backman
#19. 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
#20. All the librarians of my childhood. Who saw that a boy was afraid of heights and lent him wings.
Fredrik Backman
#21. You miss the strangest things when you lose someone. Little things. Smiles. The way she turned over in her sleep. Even repainting a room for her.
Fredrik Backman
#22. 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
#23. That was when she worked out why old people seem to have so much free time, because in the olden days until Spotify came along they must have used up almost all their time just changing the track.
Fredrik Backman
#24. Don't people get married because they're full of love and then divorced when they run out of it?" (Elsa)
"Did you learn that one in school?" (Mom)
"It's my own theory." (Elsa)
Fredrik Backman
#25. His chest thumps. It happens more and more these days. He has to sort of struggle for a mouthful of air, like a fish in an overturned bowl.
Fredrik Backman
#26. 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. He
Fredrik Backman
#27. My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry By Fredrik Backman This
Fredrik Backman
#28. When she realizes that they are about to fall, she summons the strength to stand on her own two feet. Because that is what women like Britt-Marie do. They find the strength when they have to do something for others.
Fredrik Backman
#29. Further to this, Ove has the cat's resentful stares to contend with. Something in its eyes reminds him of the way Sonja used to look at him.
Fredrik Backman
#31. A young man left Beartown in silence and when he came home again it was too late for words. You can't look a gravestone in the eye and ask its forgiveness.
Fredrik Backman
#32. Men are what they are because of what they do, not what they say.
Fredrik Backman
#33. For the perpetrator, rape lasts just a matter of minutes. For the victim, it never stops.
Fredrik Backman
#34. He'd never understood the need to go around stewing on why things turned out the way they did. You are what you are and you do what you do, and that was good enough for Ove.
Fredrik Backman
#35. 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
#36. a queen only stays in power for as long as her subjects are afraid of conflict. Or
Fredrik Backman
#37. Pirate's unruly mop has been tenderly coaxed into a hairstyle as neat as biological circumstances will allow.
Fredrik Backman
#39. It's going to be a grand adventure and a fairy tale of marvels. But it's my fault that you'll find a dragon at the end, my darling knight.
Fredrik Backman
#40. She's fifteen, above the age of consent, and he's seventeen, but he's still "the boy" in every conversation. She's "the young woman".
Words are not small things.
Fredrik Backman
#41. She stood in front of him with January in her hair and he was lost.
Fredrik Backman
#42. 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
#43. Only different people change the world," Granny used to say. "No one normal has ever changed a crapping thing.
Fredrik Backman
#44. All the best people are different -look at superheroes. After all, if superpowers were normal, everyone would have them.
Fredrik Backman
#45. She wonders how much space a person has left in her soul to change herself, once she gets older. What people does she still have to meet, what will they see in her, and what will they make her see in herself? Sami
Fredrik Backman
#46. I want someone to remember I existed. I want someone to know I was here.
Fredrik Backman
#47. 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
#48. Because if a sufficient number of people are different, no one has to be normal.
Fredrik Backman
#49. Because all seven-year-olds deserve superheroes. And anyone who doesn't agree needs their head examined.
Fredrik Backman
#50. It's much more difficult to have conflict when there are cookies around.
Fredrik Backman
#51. 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
#52. The mightiest power of death is not that it can make people die, but that it can make the people you left behind want to stop living.
Fredrik Backman
#53. Not all monsters look like monsters. There are some that carry their monstrosity inside.
Fredrik Backman
#54. Because a time comes in every man's life when he decides what sort of man he's going to be: the kind who lets other people walk all over him, or not. Ove
Fredrik Backman
#55. Humanity has many shortcomings, but none is stronger than pride.
Fredrik Backman
#56. It's a sort of computer. There are special drawing programs for it. For children,' she whispers a little louder.
And something is shining in her eyes.
Something that Ove recognizes.
Fredrik Backman
#58. I would rather be old than a grown-up. All grown-ups are angry, it's just children and old people who laugh.
Fredrik Backman
#59. They say the best men are born out of their faults and that they often improve later on, more than if they'd never done anything wrong.
Fredrik Backman
#61. It's too painful to us to admit that our children won't wait to grow up because their parents are busy with other things...
Fredrik Backman
#62. 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
#63. He was a man of black and white. And she was color. All the color he had.
Fredrik Backman
#64. It's important to people in the Land-of-Almost-Awake that it should be this way, because they believe that nothing really ever completely dies. It just turns into a story, undergoes a little shift in grammar, changes tense from 'now' to 'then'. A
Fredrik Backman
#65. We devote ourselves to sports because they remind us of how small we are just as much as they make us bigger. *
Fredrik Backman
#66. It's easier to make your way if you choose your own soundtrack
Fredrik Backman
#67. Ove is the sort of man who checks the status of all things by giving them a good kick. He
Fredrik Backman
#68. 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
#69. And where was the world going if people couldn't even write or brew a pot of coffee?
Fredrik Backman
#70. The very worst events in life have that effect on a family: we always remember, more sharply than anything else, the last happy moments before everything fell apart.
Fredrik Backman
#71. Granny then said the real trick of life was that almost no one is entirely a shit and almost no one is entirely not a shit. The hard part of life is keeping as much on the not-a-shit side as one can. Once
Fredrik Backman
#72. It is difficult to admit that one is wrong. Particularly when one has been wrong for a very long time.
Fredrik Backman
#73. 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
#74. Men like Ove and Rune were from a generation in which one was what one did, not what one talked about.
Fredrik Backman
#75. They construct words of forgiveness from the ruins of fighting words.
Fredrik Backman
#77. He believed so strongly in things: justice and fair play and hard work and a world where right just had to be right.
Fredrik Backman
#78. But if anyone had asked, he would have told them that he never lived before he met her. And not after either.
Fredrik Backman
#79. It's possible to love your grandmother for years and years without really knowing anything about her.
Fredrik Backman
#80. 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
#81. I was under the impression that one became a policeman because one believes in rules and regulations." "I think Sven became a policeman because he believes in justice.
Fredrik Backman
#82. You have to love me twice as much now," she said.
And then Ove lied to her for the second - and last - time: he said that he would. Even though he knew it wasn't possible for him to love her anymore than he already did.
Fredrik Backman
#83. Miplorisians believe that the inner voices are those of the dead coming back to help their loved ones.
Fredrik Backman
#84. Ove points at him with exasperation. You! You want to buy a French car. Don't worry so much about others, you have enough problems of your own.
Fredrik Backman
#85. 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
#87. it looks like a small envelope with a phenomenal capacity for water absorption.
Fredrik Backman
#88. In the beginning, though, they had been friends. Or, at least, friends to the extent that men like Ove and Rune were capable of being friends."
p. 81
Fredrik Backman
#89. Granny always said Britt-Marie was the sort of woman who would have to drink two glasses of wine and feel really wild and crazy to be able to fantasize about solving a crossword in ink.
Fredrik Backman
#90. 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
#91. For more than half a century they belonged to one another. She detested the same characteristics in him that last day as she had the first time she saw him under that tree, and still adored all the others.
Fredrik Backman
#92. Because it was Granny who had told Elsa about the Christmas tree dance in Miamas, and no one who's heard that story wants to have a spruce tree that someone has amputated and sold into slavery. In
Fredrik Backman
#93. Opposite Lennart and Maud lives Alf. He drives a taxi and always wears a leather jacket under a layer of irascibility.
Fredrik Backman
#94. The towers of removal boxes throw shadows across the hall, like monuments to everything that is now absent
Fredrik Backman
#95. 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
#96. Britt-Marie feels Fredrik's hateful stare at her back as she and Vega follow her down the corridor, so she slows and walks behind Vega, to stop his stares hitting the girl.
Fredrik Backman
#97. I feel so much loss, Ove. Loss, as if my heart was beating outside my body.
Fredrik Backman
#98. The very sort of smile that makes decent folk want to slap Buddhist monks in the face,
Fredrik Backman
#99. There's something special about a grandmother's house. You never forget how it smells.
Fredrik Backman
#100. What does it mean when someone supports Manchester United or whatever it's called?"
...
"They always win. So they've started believing they deserve to.
Fredrik Backman
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