The Winners Quotes

“This hurts too much to touch with words.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners

“He has seen good people capable of great evil, but also evil people capable of incredible light. It's the same everywhere. Almost everybody loves too much, hates too easily, forgives too little. But most people want the same things: to live in peace, to make their hearts beat a little slower when the night comes, to earn some money to support the ones they love.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners

“He’s the sort of person who runs toward a fire. No hesitation, no questions, he just runs. People like that are rare, but you know who they are when you see them.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners

“We fool ourselves that we can protect the people we love, because if we accepted the truth we’d never let them out of our sight.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners

“To you who talk too much and sing too loud and cry too often and love something in life more than you should.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners

“When you're young you believe that love is infatuation, but infatuation is simple, any child can become infatuated, fall in love. But real love? Love is a job for an adult. Love demands a whole person, all the best of you, all the worst. It has nothing to do with romance, because the hard part of a marriage isn't that I have to live seeing all your faults, but that you have to live with me seeing them. That I know everything about you now. Most people aren't brave enough to live without secrets. Everyone dreams about being invisible sometimes, no one dreams of being transparent.

Marriage? There ought to be a different word for it after a while. Because there's no such thing as 'eternal infatuation,' only love lasts that long, and it's never simple. It requires a whole person, everything you have. The whole lot.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners

“Our children never warn us that they’re thinking of growing up, one day they’re just too big to want to hold our hand, it’s just as well we never know when the last time is going to be or we’d never let go.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners

“Because he was always the sort of person who stood in the way, the sort who protected, the sort who ran. He always thought he was the bad guy in all stories, the real heroes always do, that’s why stories about boys like him never end with them growing old.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners

“No one tells you before you procreate that the hardest thing about being a good parent is that you never feel like one.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners

“If nobody knows who you are, you can be whoever you want to be.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners

“You have to make the most of the happy endings whenever you get the chance.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners

“The very finest thing you can give a child is somewhere to belong. The biggest thing you can have is being part of something.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners

“That’s why someone who hated their own childhood often has greater empathy than someone who loved theirs. Because someone who had a hard time dreamed of other realities, but someone who had it easy can hardly imagine that things could be any different.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners

“The most unbearable thing about death is that the world just goes on. Time doesn't care. The morning after the storm, the sun goes up as if it's mocking us, over a wrecked forest and a battered town.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners

“Being married is easy, she usually thinks. You just pick an argument you’re really good at, then repeat it at least once a week for all eternity.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners

“We all have a hundred fake personalities depending upon who we’re with. We pretend and dissemble and stifle ourselves just to fit in.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners

“There will be a spring and a summer. It's almost excruciating. But then comes autumn, short as a wink, before winter is finally upon us again. Life does not go on, it starts again, everything is possible again. Anything can happen, all the best and all the most beautiful and all the greatest adventures on earth.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners

“Because of course it was only a dog. It’s so hard to explain that it’s more than an animal when you’re that animal’s human. Perhaps it takes more empathy than most people are capable of. Or more imagination.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners

“But you can never fool dogs. They know all that’s best in you.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners

“Parents always think they have to talk to their daughters about guys. We shouldn’t wear short skirts and shouldn’t go out alone and shouldn’t get drunk and shouldn’t let guys like us too much. But you don’t have to talk to us about guys because we already know all that, for fuck’s sake, because we’re the ones they rape!! Talk to your damn sons instead!!! Teach them to talk to one another and teach them to stop one another. Raise just one fucking boy somewhere who can become a head teacher who understands that when boys pull girls by the hair, it’s the fucking boys there’s something wrong with. Tell your sons that if they have to THINK about whether or not they’ve had sex with a girl who didn’t want it, then they HAVE!!! If you can’t understand if the girl you’re having sex with wants it or not, then you’ve never had fucking sex with a girl who wants it. Stop telling your daughters. We already know it all.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners

“Falling in love with a place and falling in love with a person are related adventures. At first we run around street corners giggling and explore every inch of each other’s skin, over the years we get to know every cobblestone and strand of hair and snore, and the waters of time soften our passion into unfailing love, and in the end the eyes we wake up next to and the horizon outside our window are the same thing: home.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners

“We can’t fight against evil. That’s the most unbearable thing about the world we have built. Evil can’t be eradicated, can’t be locked up, the more violence we use against it, the stronger it becomes when it seeps out under doors and through keyholes. It can never disappear because it grows inside us, sometimes even in the best of us, sometimes even in fourteen-year-olds. We have no weapons against it. We have only been given love as a gift in order to cope with it.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners

“Sometimes, the greatest form of leadership is knowing the way home.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners

“Fairy tales are what help us cope with funerals.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners

“One day you will be one of the people who lived long ago,” it says.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners

“There’s an immensity of love that bursts from your chest the first time you hear your child cry, every emotion you’ve ever felt is amplified to the point of absurdity, children open floodgates inside us, upward as well as down. You’ve never felt so happy, and never felt so scared. Don’t say “don’t worry” to someone in that position. You can’t love someone like this without worrying about everything, forever.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners

“If you want to achieve what no one else can, you have to do what no one else wants to do.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners

“Everyone I know with any sense has two families, the one they were given and the one they chose. You can’t do anything about the first, but you can damn well take responsibility for the second!”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners

“No one tells you before you procreate that the hardest thing about being a good parent is that you never feel like one. If you’re absent you’re committing one big mistake, but if you’re present the whole time you commit a million tiny ones, and teenagers keep a count. Oh, how they keep a count.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners

“Shame and guilt and disappointment, the Devil’s most effective tools.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Winners