“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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“It was the prerogative of the powerful to betray their servants. You played their game or you played your own. The end was the same.”
― quote from M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio
“I've never understood why looking hot had to be equated with sex and conquest. Whatever happened to anticipation, to courtship, to true love? Can't a person look hot and not have it mean something? Call me an old-fashioned Naomi bitch, but I'm holding out for true love. Even if it's an unattainable fantasy”
― Rachel Cohn, quote from Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List
“Unlike the Marines, who are given macho monikers like “jarheads,” the Coast Guard had long been denigrated in military circles as fey “puddle jumpers.” But just as 9/11 brought a newfound respect to firemen, Katrina did the same for the reputation of the Coast Guard. At the peak of rescue operations they had 62 aircraft, 30 cutters, and 111 small boats stepping up in rescue and recovery operations. They did it all one person at a time.”
― Douglas Brinkley, quote from The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast
“I guess a person who is defeated does not know fear any more. He is already prepared to go further down. He is even prepared to die. You can’t scare or threaten a person who has lost all hope in life.”
― Priya Kumar, quote from I Am Another You: A Journey to Powerful Breakthroughs
“Luke captured my gaze again and said, "If beauty were time, you'd be eternity." My heart stopped. I was paralysed to look away from him
(...)
Thankfully, another senior boy who apparently wasn't dating anyone spoke. And when the words came out of his mouth, I understood why he was girlfriendless. "If you were a booger, I'd pick you first."
A lot of yuck and that's gross penetrated the table's atmosphere. A rain of crumpled napkins showered over the boy. Of course, all the guys laughed at him, including Luke, who was finally looking away from me.
I was never so grateful for such a tactless comment.”
― Shannon Dermott, quote from Waiting for Mercy
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