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

Backman Quotes #3776
#2. He loves white cables. And white telephones. And white computer monitors with fruit on the back.

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #10303
#3. It's a grandmother's privilege never to have to show her grandchild who she was before she became a grandmother.

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #12200
#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

Backman Quotes #19076
#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

Backman Quotes #32179
#6. Ove doubts whether someone who can't park a car properly should even be allowed to vote. When

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #34665
#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

Backman Quotes #37955
#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

Backman Quotes #38968
#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

Backman Quotes #44237
#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

Backman Quotes #56720
#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

Backman Quotes #87348
#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

Backman Quotes #94036
#13. their house every six months. Or, to be more exact,

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #109764
#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

Backman Quotes #112090
#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

Backman Quotes #113127
#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

Backman Quotes #128108
#17. Never again do you find friends like the ones you have when you're fifteen years old.

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #131400
#18. Culture. [...] That most people don't do what we tell them to do. They do what they can get away with.

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #131918
#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

Backman Quotes #137881
#20. All the librarians of my childhood. Who saw that a boy was afraid of heights and lent him wings.

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #138526
#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

Backman Quotes #142872
#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

Backman Quotes #148515
#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

Backman Quotes #168103
#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

Backman Quotes #169723
#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

Backman Quotes #179441
#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

Backman Quotes #180712
#27. My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry By Fredrik Backman This

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #186588
#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

Backman Quotes #190659
#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

Backman Quotes #193696
#30. Rune, made Anita "doolally in

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #196529
#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

Backman Quotes #202879
#32. Men are what they are because of what they do, not what they say.

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #208890
#33. For the perpetrator, rape lasts just a matter of minutes. For the victim, it never stops.

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #213104
#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

Backman Quotes #216296
#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

Backman Quotes #227452
#36. a queen only stays in power for as long as her subjects are afraid of conflict. Or

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #228574
#37. Pirate's unruly mop has been tenderly coaxed into a hairstyle as neat as biological circumstances will allow.

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #230240
#38. Big secrets turn us into small men." Benji

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #234715
#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

Backman Quotes #239646
#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

Backman Quotes #240570
#41. She stood in front of him with January in her hair and he was lost.

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #265899
#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

Backman Quotes #269274
#43. Only different people change the world," Granny used to say. "No one normal has ever changed a crapping thing.

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #274293
#44. All the best people are different -look at superheroes. After all, if superpowers were normal, everyone would have them.

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #283193
#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

Backman Quotes #283672
#46. I want someone to remember I existed. I want someone to know I was here.

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #284949
#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

Backman Quotes #290404
#48. Because if a sufficient number of people are different, no one has to be normal.

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #290665
#49. Because all seven-year-olds deserve superheroes. And anyone who doesn't agree needs their head examined.

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #293468
#50. It's much more difficult to have conflict when there are cookies around.

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #302412
#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

Backman Quotes #306039
#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

Backman Quotes #307720
#53. Not all monsters look like monsters. There are some that carry their monstrosity inside.

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #326718
#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

Backman Quotes #328653
#55. Humanity has many shortcomings, but none is stronger than pride.

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #329760
#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

Backman Quotes #330652
#57. I'm pants at aiming.

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #334968
#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

Backman Quotes #338576
#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

Backman Quotes #339062
#60. Soccer is poetry for me, you

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #341496
#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

Backman Quotes #357420
#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

Backman Quotes #364334
#63. He was a man of black and white. And she was color. All the color he had.

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #379776
#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

Backman Quotes #385318
#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

Backman Quotes #387805
#66. It's easier to make your way if you choose your own soundtrack

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #425519
#67. Ove is the sort of man who checks the status of all things by giving them a good kick. He

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #432089
#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

Backman Quotes #452575
#69. And where was the world going if people couldn't even write or brew a pot of coffee?

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #454913
#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

Backman Quotes #462437
#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

Backman Quotes #464679
#72. It is difficult to admit that one is wrong. Particularly when one has been wrong for a very long time.

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #476324
#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

Backman Quotes #482440
#74. Men like Ove and Rune were from a generation in which one was what one did, not what one talked about.

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #483781
#75. They construct words of forgiveness from the ruins of fighting words.

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #484884
#76. I'm not running a cat repair company

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #485573
#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

Backman Quotes #490314
#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

Backman Quotes #490508
#79. It's possible to love your grandmother for years and years without really knowing anything about her.

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #494748
#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

Backman Quotes #503703
#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

Backman Quotes #512079
#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

Backman Quotes #513998
#83. Miplorisians believe that the inner voices are those of the dead coming back to help their loved ones.

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #527206
#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

Backman Quotes #530548
#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

Backman Quotes #535080
#86. This sport demands only one thing from you. Your all.

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #536775
#87. it looks like a small envelope with a phenomenal capacity for water absorption.

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #538846
#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

Backman Quotes #544876
#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

Backman Quotes #549124
#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

Backman Quotes #557149
#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

Backman Quotes #563613
#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

Backman Quotes #573823
#93. Opposite Lennart and Maud lives Alf. He drives a taxi and always wears a leather jacket under a layer of irascibility.

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #580918
#94. The towers of removal boxes throw shadows across the hall, like monuments to everything that is now absent

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #586112
#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

Backman Quotes #590729
#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

Backman Quotes #591253
#97. I feel so much loss, Ove. Loss, as if my heart was beating outside my body.

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #592519
#98. The very sort of smile that makes decent folk want to slap Buddhist monks in the face,

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #593082
#99. There's something special about a grandmother's house. You never forget how it smells.

Fredrik Backman

Backman Quotes #593590
#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

Backman Quotes #594394

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