“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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“Well, your perfect erotic object remains only in recognition memory); and his absolute absence from reconstruction memory becomes the yearning that is, finally, desire. That socially surrounded absence, when you’re young, masks a lot of things in the real world; when you’re older and a few thousand sexual encounters have begun to clear what desire is about (or perhaps what really lies about desire) and you have begun to perceive desire’s edges, its effect is not so much that of an obliterator any more as it is that of a distorting lens. If you can smile at what you see through, it’s sometimes illuminating.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
“One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., quote from The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.
“I’ll bet. I . . .” He couldn’t say it, not so baldly. He dodged, while he mustered courage. “I promised to call Nicol when I had news of Bel, and I haven’t had a chance. The news, as you may know, is not good; we found Bel, but the herm has been deliberately infected with a bioengineered Cetagandan parasite that may . . . may prove lethal.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from Diplomatic Immunity
“Sometimes they would sit in the parlor together, both reading – in entirely separate worlds, to be sure, but joined somehow. When this happened, other people in the family couldn't bring themselves to disturb them. All that could be heard in the parlor was the sound of pages, turning.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Blackbird House
“All those who rejoice in the success of the church's enemies will share with them in their downfall; and those who have most indulged themselves in pride and pleasure are the least able to bear calamities; their sorrows will be as excessive as their pleasure and jollity were before.”
― Matthew Henry, quote from Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible
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