Fredrik Backman Quotes

Mum is a perfectionist and Dad is a pedant and that was partly why their marriage didn't work so well, Elsa figures. Because a perfectionist and a pedant are two very different things.

You only need one ray of light to chase all the shadows away.

Humanity has many shortcomings, but none is stronger than pride.

It's possible to love your grandmother for years and years without really knowing anything about her.

And now she stood outside the station with his flowers pressed happily to her breast, in all that red cardigan of hers, making the rest of the world look as if it was made in greyscale.

One morning you wake up with more life behind you than in front of you, not being able to understand how it’s happened.

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.

All people at root are time optimists. We always think there's enough time to do things with other people. Time to say things to them. And then something happens and then we stand there holding on to words like 'if'.

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

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.

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.

Everyone has a thousand wishes before a tragedy, but just one afterward.

The mightiest power of death is not that it can make people die, but that it can make people left behind want to stop living, she thinks, without remembering where she heard that.

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.

And then Mum spoons the coffee a little as if she’s having fantasies of flinging it in Britt-Marie’s face. But in a controlled way.

Ove gives the box a skeptical glance, as if it's a highly dubious sort of box, a box that rides a scooter and wears tracksuit pants and just called Ove "my friend" before offering to sell him a watch.

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