Fredrik Backman · 372 pages
Rating: (85.9K votes)
“Only different people change the world,” Granny used to say. “No one normal has ever changed a crapping thing.”
― Fredrik Backman, quote from My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
“Death’s greatest power is not that it can make people die, but that it can make people want to stop living.”
― Fredrik Backman, quote from My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
“Because not all monsters were monsters in the beginning. Some are monsters born of sorrow.”
― Fredrik Backman, quote from My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
“Never mess with someone who has more spare time than you do[.]”
― Fredrik Backman, quote from My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
“Having a grandmother is like having an army. This is a grandchild’s ultimate privilege: knowing that someone is on your side, always, whatever the details.”
― Fredrik Backman, quote from My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
“Elsa decides that even if people she likes have been shits on earlier occasions, she has to learn to carry on liking them. You’d quickly run out of people if you had to disqualify all those who at some point have been shits.”
― Fredrik Backman, quote from My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
“We want to be loved,’ ” quotes Britt-Marie. “ ‘Failing that, admired; failing that, feared; failing that, hated and despised. At all costs we want to stir up some sort of feeling in others. The soul abhors a vacuum. At all costs it longs for contact.’ ”
― Fredrik Backman, quote from My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
“I want someone to remember I existed. I want someone to know I was here.”
― Fredrik Backman, quote from My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
“if you hate the one who hates, you could risk becoming like the one you hate.”
― Fredrik Backman, quote from My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
“Having a grandmother is like having an army. This is a grandchild's ultimate privilege: knowing that someone is on your side, always, whatever the details. Even when you are wrong. Especially then, in fact. A grandmother is both a sword and a shield.”
― Fredrik Backman, quote from My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
“... not all monsters look like monsters. There are some that carry their monstrosity inside.”
― Fredrik Backman, quote from My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
“One day at a time. One dream at a time. And one could say it’s right and one could say it’s wrong. And probably both would be right. Because life is both complicated and simple. Which is why there are cookies.”
― Fredrik Backman, quote from My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
“The currency there is imagination; instead of buying something with coins, you buy it with a good story. Libraries aren’t known as libraries but as “banks,” and every fairy tale is worth a fortune.”
― Fredrik Backman, quote from My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
“Every seven-year-old deserves a superhero. That's just how it is.”
― Fredrik Backman, quote from My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
“Everything is complicated if no one explains it to you.”
― Fredrik Backman, quote from My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
“Because if a sufficient number of people are different, no one has to be normal.”
― Fredrik Backman, quote from My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
“Grow up and be different and don’t let anyone tell you not to be different, because all superheroes are different.”
― Fredrik Backman, quote from My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
“Granny and Elsa used to watch the evening news together. Now and then Elsa would ask Granny why grown-ups were always doing such idiotic things to each other. Granny usually answered that it was because grown-ups were generally people, and people are generally shits. Elsa countered that grown-ups were also responsible for a lot of good things in between all the idiocy – space exploration, the UN, vaccines and cheese slicers, for instance. 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.”
― Fredrik Backman, quote from My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
“When it comes to terror, reality’s got nothing on the power of the imagination[.]”
― Fredrik Backman, quote from My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
“There’s something special about a grandmother’s house. You never forget how it smells.”
― Fredrik Backman, quote from My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
“People have to tell their stories, Elsa. Or they suffocate.”
― Fredrik Backman, quote from My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
“It’s hard to help those who don’t want to help themselves.”
“Someone who wants to help himself is possibly not the one who most needs help from others,” Elsa objects.”
― Fredrik Backman, quote from My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
“It's strange how close love and fear live to each other.”
― Fredrik Backman, quote from My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
“Elsa is the sort of child who learned early in life that it's easier to make your way if you get to choose your own soundtrack.”
― Fredrik Backman, quote from My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
“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.”
― Fredrik Backman, quote from My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
“Don’t fight with monsters, for you can become one. If you look into the abyss for long enough, the abyss looks into you.”
― Fredrik Backman, quote from My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
“It's much more difficult to have conflict when there are cookies around.”
― Fredrik Backman, quote from My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
“People who have never been hunted always seem to think there’s a reason for it. ‘They wouldn’t do it without a cause, would they? You must have done something to provoke them.’ As if that was how oppression works.”
― Fredrik Backman, quote from My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
Fredrik Backman
Born place: in Stockholm, Sweden
Born date June 2, 1981
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“What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, quote from The Remains of the Day
“Finally, I wish to remember the millions of Allied servicemen and prisoners of war who lived the story of the Second World War. Many of these men never came home; many others returned bearing emotional and physical scars that would stay with them for the rest of their lives. I come away from this book with the deepest appreciation for what these men endured, and what they scarified, for the good of humanity. It is to them that this book {Unbroken} is dedicated,”
― Laura Hillenbrand, quote from Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption
“Another two-bowl morning?" - Damien Maslin asking Zoey Redbird if her love of cereal was the reason she was almost late for Vamp Soc class”
― P.C. Cast, quote from Betrayed
“What nobility of feeling! To sacrifice your own pleasure to preserve the comfort of others! It is a thing, I confess, that would never occur to me.”
― Susanna Clarke, quote from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked higher than the pyramids; they had killed themselves over the failure to find a love none of us could ever be. In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, quote from The Virgin Suicides
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