Best 142 quotes of Fredrik Backman on MyQuotes

She laughed and laughed and laughed until the vowels were rolling across the walls and floors, as if they meant to do away with the laws of time and space. It made Ove feel as if his chest was slowly rising out of the ruins of a collapsed house after an earthquake. It gave his heart space to beat again.

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.

Something inside a man goes to pieces when he has to bury the only person who ever understood him. There is no time to heal that sort of wound.

Sons want their fathers' attention until the precise moment when fathers want their sons'.

Takoví jsou to muži. Za svítání vyjdou s dvěma holýma rukama na trávník a dovnitř se vrátí z nově postavené verandy. Jakože cože? Já jsem dvěma holýma rukama leda tak vyhrál Grand Theft Auto IV. A to jsem použil cheat all weapons. Tvoji dědečkové si sami postavili domy v době, kdy ještě nebyl Google. Uvědomuješ si, co je to za výkon? To nejsou lidi. To jsou švýcarské armádní nože se strništěm na bradě.

That tendency exists in all sports: parents always think their own expertise increases automatically as their child gets better at something.

That whole first year, jeez, your entire life revolves around poop. The presence of poop. The absence of poop. The discovery of poop. The aromatic sensation of poop. The waiting for poop. Seriously, I can't express how much of your life will be spent waiting for poop once you have children.

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

The children's hobbies aren't only the children's hobbies - the parents put just as many hours into them, year after year, sacrificing so much, paying out such huge amounts of money, that their significance eats its way even into adult brains. They started to symbolize other things compensating for or reinforcing the parents' own failures.

The only reliable thing about Benji has always been that he's unreliable. But to everyone's surprise, nature managed to get through to him where people failed. When someone learns to be in the forest as a child, it's like gaining an extra language. The air talks here, and Benji understands. It's mournful and wild.

The only thing you can rely on in all towns, big and small alike, is that there will be broken people. It's nothing to do with the place, just life; it can beat us up. And if that happens, it's easy to find your way to a pub; bars can quickly become sad places. Someone who has nowhere else to go can grasp a glass a little too tightly; someone who's tired of falling can take refuge in the bottom of a bottle, seeing as you can't fall much further from there.

There are certainly a good number of alternatives to "shit," if you have a particular need to express such a feeling.

There are thousands of ways to die in Beartown. Especially on the inside.

There’s a loser in every relationship. We may not like to admit it, but one of us always gets a little more and one of us always gives up a little more readily.

The rush lifts him up, his endorphins are bubbling, and afterward he will remember thinking: “How can anyone possibly experience this without thinking he’s a god?

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.

The women glare at each other. Grin. You have friends when you're fifteen years old. Sometimes you get them back.

They always are, but when politics work in our favor we call it "cooperation," and when it favors others we call it "corruption.

They forgot what made them successful.” “What do you do when that happens?” “You start again.

They hate people and their stories; they have hated for so long and with such intensity that in the end the darkness enveloped their whole bodies until their shapes were no longer discernible. That is also why they are so difficult to defeat, because they can disappear into walls or into the ground or float up. They're ferocious and bloodthirsty, and if you're bitten by one you don't just die; a far more serious and terrible fate lies in store: you lose your imagination. (talking about shadows)

This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. So I need to get going.

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.

Until there are so many of them that no one dares to chase them anymore. Until they're an army in themselves. Because if a sufficient number of people are different, no one has to be normal.

Violence is the easiest and the hardest thing in the world to understand. Some of us are prepared to use it to get power, others only in self-defense, some all the time, others not at all. But then there's another type, unlike all the others, who seems to fight entirely without purpose. Ask anyone who has looked into a pair of those eyes when they turn dark, and you'll realize that we belong to different species. No one can really know if those people lack something that other people possess or if it's the other way around. If something goes out inside them when they clench their fists or if something switches on.

we always remember, more sharply than anything else, the last happy moment before everything fell apart.

We have to do it for my mum's sake. Because I'm hoping that the last sorry will be to her.

We thought she'd save him. We all hoped so much that she'd save him because it would have been like a fairy tale and when one had lived in the dark for so long it's very difficult not to believe in fairy tales.

[...] whatever is happening isn’t important. The important thing is how you explain it to people.

What is a community? It is the sum total of our choices.

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.

When he heard that she was thinking of carrying on with her career in parallel with Peter's, he exclaimed in surprise: "But who's going to take care of the kids?"She really did try to keep quiet. Well, maybe not really, but in hindsight she thinks she did try at least. Eventually she turned to the president and pointed at his greasy, sausage like fingers, which were clutching a prawn sandwich, than at his stomach, which was straining against the buttons of his shirt, and said, "I thought maybe you could take care of them. You have got bigger breasts than me, after all.

When it comes to terror, reality’s got nothing on the power of the imagination[.]

When Peter and Kira had their first child, Isak, Kira said to him, "This is what we are now. Everything else comes after this. First and foremost, we are parents!" Peter already knew that, of course. All parents know. It's not a voluntary process, it's an emotional assault; you become someone else's property the first time you hear your child cry. You belong to that little person now. Before everything else. So when something happens to your child, it never stops being your fault.

Words are small things. No one means any harm by them, they keep saying that. Everyone is just doing their job. The police say it all the time. 'I'm just doing my job here.' That's why no one asks what the boy did; as soon as the girl starts to talk they interrupt her instead with questions about what she did. Did she go up the stairs ahead of him or behind him? Did she lie down on the bed voluntarily or was she forced? Did she unbutton her own blouse? Did she kiss him? No? Did she kiss him back, then? Had she been drinking alcohol? Had she smoked marijuana? Did she say no? Was she clear about that? Did she scream loudly enough? Did she struggle hard enough? Why didn't she take photographs of her bruises right away? Why did she run from the party instead of saying anything to the other guests? They have to gather all the information, they say, when they ask the same question ten times in different ways in order to see if she changes her answer. This is a serious allegation, they remind her, as if it's the allegation that's the problem. She is told all the things she shouldn't have done: She shouldn't have waited so long before going to the police. She shouldn't have gotten rid of the clothes she was wearing. Shouldn't have showered. Shouldn't have drunk alcohol. Shouldn't have put herself in that situation. Shouldn't have gone into the room, up the stairs, given him the impression. If only she hadn't existed, then none of this would have happened, why didn't she think of that? 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.

You can force people to obey you, but you can never force them to follow you. If you want them to play for you, they have to love you.

You can love something without loving everything about it. You don't have to feel embarrassed about not being proud. That applies to hockey, but it also applies to friends.

You can't cultivate that sort of friendship, it only grows in the wild.

You miss the strangest things when you lose someone.

You never say good-bye in the Land-of-Almost-Awake. You just say "see you later". 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".

You're not scared. You're just grieving. No one tells you humans that your sorrow feels like fear.

Your grandma always had a terrible sense of direction. She could get lost on an escalator.

You should choose your battles if you can, but if the battle chooses you then kick the sod in his fuse box!