Fredrik Backman Quotes - Page 2

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

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?

For the perpetrator, rape lasts just a matter of minutes. For the victim, it never stops.

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

People said Ove saw the world in black and white. But she was color. All the color he had.

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

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.

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.

Death is a strange thing. People live their whole lives as if it does not exist, and yet it's often one of the great motivations for living. Some of us, in time, become so conscious of it that we live harder, more obstinately, with more fury.

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.

Grow up and be different and don’t let anyone tell you not to be different, because all superheroes are different.

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

Men are what they are because of what they do, not what they say.

She goes silent. Ashamed of herself as mothers are when they realize they have passed that point in life when they want more from their daughters than their daughters want from them.

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.

People can turn into idiots if they're alone for long enough. (Mum)

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

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

Sometimes it's easier to go on living, not even knowing who you are, when at least you know precisely where you are while you go on not knowing.

To love someone is like moving into a house," Sonja used to say. "At first you fall in love in everything new, you wonder every morning that this is one's own, as if they are afraid that someone will suddenly come tumbling through the door and say that there has been a serious mistake and that it simply was not meant to would live so fine. But as the years go by, the facade worn, the wood cracks here and there, and you start to love this house not so much for all the ways it is perfect in that for all the ways it is not. You become familiar with all its nooks and crannies. How to avoid that the key gets stuck in the lock if it is cold outside. Which floorboards have some give when you step on them, and exactly how to open the doors for them not to creak. That's it, all the little secrets that make it your home. " - Fredrik Backman , A Man Called Ove

You're the funniest thing she knows. That's why she always draws you in color.

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.