“Not having time for a person, not being able to sit in silence together with somebody, that's the same as rejecting them, as being scornful about them.”
― Henning Mankell, quote from The White Lioness
“Unlike Tania, who was so slim, Rykoff looked as if he'd been given an order to get fat--an order he had been delighted to obey.”
― Henning Mankell, quote from The White Lioness
“The game had started. Everybody was assuring everybody else how reliable they were. In fact, nobody trusted anybody but themselves”
― Henning Mankell, quote from The White Lioness
“There are two kinds of dangerous situations. One is the kind you get yourself into. The other just sucks you in.”
― Henning Mankell, quote from The White Lioness
“We all have our peculiarities,” said Wallander.”
― Henning Mankell, quote from The White Lioness
“At a time which seemed to him as far distant as the dim and distant past of his ancestors, his father, Okumana, the man who could make better spear tips than anyone else, had explained to him that there was always a way out of any situation, as long as one was alive. Death was the last hiding place. That was something to keep in reserve until there was no other way of avoiding an apparently insuperable threat. There were always escape routes that were not immediately obvious, and that was why humans, unlike animals, had a brain. In order to look inward, not outward. Inward, toward the secret places where the spirits of one’s ancestors were waiting to act as a man’s guide through life. Who am I? he thought. A human being who has lost his identity is no longer a human being. He is an animal. That’s what has happened to me. I started to kill people because I myself was dead. When I was a child and saw the signs, the accursed signs telling the blacks where they were allowed to go and what existed exclusively for the whites, I started to be diminished even then. A child should grow, grow bigger; but in my country a black child had to learn how to grow smaller and smaller. I saw my parents succumb to their own invisibility, their own accumulated bitterness. I was an obedient child and learned to be a nobody among nobodies. Apartheid was my real father. I learned what no one should need to learn. To live with falsehood, contempt, a lie elevated to the only truth in my country. A lie enforced by the police and laws, but above all by a flood of white water, a torrent of words about the natural differences between white and black, the superiority of white civilization. That superiority turned me into a murderer, songoma. And I can believe this is the ultimate consequence of learning to grow smaller and smaller as a child. For what has this apartheid, this falsified white superiority been but a systematic plundering of our souls? When our despair exploded in furious”
― Henning Mankell, quote from The White Lioness
“I have to say it all sounds pretty improbable,” said Björk. “We live in an improbable world,” said Wallander.”
― Henning Mankell, quote from The White Lioness
“It was a feeling which stayed with him after he got back home to his terrace house on the Kristianstad road. When he had finished his dinner and played with his children for a while, he went out with the dog. Martinsson lived in the neighbourhood, so he decided to stop by and tell he and Noren had seen. The dog was a Labrador bitch and Martinsson had asked recently if he could join the waiting list for puppies.”
― Henning Mankell, quote from The White Lioness
“Tutte le domande continuano a rimanere senza risposta, pensò. Passo la mia vita a cercare di assicurare alla giustizia dei criminali che hanno commesso una serie di reati. Ogni tanto ci riesco, ma il più delle volte fallisco. Ma quando arriverò alla fine della mia vita dovrò constatare di avere fallito in quella che è la più importante delle ricerche. Quel mistero stravagante che è la vita rimarrà irrisolto.”
― Henning Mankell, quote from The White Lioness
“KGB might have replaced the songoma in this Russian empire, where no citizen was allowed to believe in holy spirits except in great secrecy. It seemed to him that a society that attempted to put the gods to flight would be doomed. The nkosis know that in my homeland, and hence our gods have not been threatened by apartheid. They can live freely and have never been subjected to the pass laws; they have always been able to move around without being humiliated. If our holy spirits had been banished to remote prison islands, and our singing hounds chased out into the Kalahari Desert, not a single white man, woman or child would have survived in South Africa. All of them, Afrikaners as well as Englishmen, would have been annihilated long ago and their miserable skeletons buried in the red soil. In the old days, when his ancestors were still fighting openly against the white intruders, the Zulu warriors used to cut off their fallen victims’ lower jaw. An impi returning from a victorious battle would bring with him these jawbones as trophies to adorn the temple entrances of their tribal chiefs. Now it was the gods who were on the front line against the whites, and they would never submit to defeat. The first night in the strange”
― Henning Mankell, quote from The White Lioness
Henning Mankell
Born place: in Stockholm, Sweden
Born date February 3, 1948
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“The sand looked so beautiful then, so many little individual grains in the light of the night, giving the watcher the childhood feeling of infinite things finally understood, the humiliating feeling of the watcher's nothingness.”
― Ayi Kwei Armah, quote from The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
“In my fantasies, I was always caught up in heroic struggles, and I saw myself saving lives, sacrificing myself for others. I had far loftier ambitions than mere romance.”
― Irene Gut Opdyke, quote from In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer
“Below these words was the garden’s name in English: EVENING MISTS. I felt I was about to enter a place that existed only in the overlapping of air and water, light and time.”
― Tan Twan Eng, quote from The Garden of Evening Mists
“I want you to remember that in life you will encounter some very tough times, but you can find your strength in God. If there is something missing in your life, seek the Lord. If you once had Him in your life and now He seems far away, guess who moved? He is still there; just go to Him. He loves you with an everlasting love, and through obedience to Him all commitments will endure.”
― quote from The Vow
“Girl! I hope you did lots of nasty with Our Dear Sullivan and made us all proud. Please bring him back in a good mood. And eager to give us all raises. We need shoes. Hearts, Lindsey.”
― Chloe Neill, quote from Biting Cold
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