Top 100 Henning Mankell Quotes
#1. At what point does the normal suddenly become the abnormal? he
Henning Mankell
#2. I am a very radical person - as radical now as I was when I was younger. So my books all have in common my search for understanding of the terrible world we are living in and ways to change it.
Henning Mankell
#3. Dreams can be of value even if you don't have an opportunity to turn them into reality.
Henning Mankell
#4. I think my Wallander stories give a fairly good image of the world in the 1990s. I don't regret anything about that - on the contrary!
Henning Mankell
#5. Just as no significant work of art can be created without the element of irrationality that is in fact the artist's talent." p.179
"He wondered if there was a greater distance than the one between two people in the same bed pretending to sleep." p.213
Henning Mankell
#6. Memory is like glass. A person who has died is still visible, very close. But we can no longer contact each other. Death is mute; it excludes conversations, only allows silence.
Henning Mankell
#8. Life took on quite a special meaning in this early morning solitude.
Henning Mankell
#10. I work every day until I do not have more to say. I learned from Graham Greene that a very good way is to stop work in the middle of a sentence. Then you know exactly how to continue the day after.
Henning Mankell
#11. My father thought, and now I think too, that the system of democracy is entirely based upon the system of justice. If we do not have a system of justice that people believe in, the system of democracy will fail.
Henning Mankell
#12. If a policeman is serious about his profession but says he has time, he lies.
Henning Mankell
#13. the remnants of a person's life inevitably ended up at the nearest dump.
Henning Mankell
#14. Among all the nonsense, mistakes, and bad ideas we come up with, maybe some truth will sneak in.
Henning Mankell
#15. Every time Wallander stepped into a strange apartment, he felt as though he were looking at the covers of a book he had just bought. The apartment, the furniture, the pictures on the walls, and the smells were the title. Now he had to start reading.
Henning Mankell
#16. Justice doesn't only mean that the people who commit crime are punished. It also means that we can never give up seeking the truth.
Henning Mankell
#17. 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
#18. At the time of independence in 1975, Mozambique was extremely poor. Many Portuguese residents abandoned the country, leaving only a handful of well-educated Mozambicans to try to run the country.
Henning Mankell
#19. On the one hand, everything is connected, on the other hand, it is not.
Henning Mankell
#20. He took a sheet of paper out of a desk drawer. But what would he write? The day's work had hardly involved more than collecting a large number of question marks.
Henning Mankell
#21. He wondered if he was simply starting to crumble under the weight of all the responsibility and was now on a downward trajectory to a point where only fear remained. He
Henning Mankell
#22. Children get acquainted with each other in a special way, they do not make contracts as adults, they believe each other or not. Childish friendships often end in violence. You may become an enemy all of a sudden as well as notice that you are someone's best friend.
Henning Mankell
#24. The game had started. Everybody was assuring everybody else how reliable they were. In fact, nobody trusted anybody but themselves
Henning Mankell
#27. Poverty always looks the same, no matter where you come across it. The rich can always express their opulence by varying their lives. Different houses, clothes, cars. Or thoughts, dreams. But for the poor there is nothing but compulsory grayness, the only form of expression available to poverty.
Henning Mankell
#28. Africa was the most exotic place I could conceive of - the end of the world - and I knew I would go there one day.
Henning Mankell
#29. I intend to die with a bottle of champagne by my bed. I'll drink a toast to the fact that, despite everything, I was able to experience the singular adventure of being born, living and one day disappearing into the darkness once again.
Henning Mankell
#30. We used to send whole flocks of birds shooting out of our mouths and never managed to grab them by their wings.
Henning Mankell
#31. Although many of his other novels are brilliant there is a power in 'Oliver Twist' that I believe Dickens never managed to retrieve. It is as if he was sent to this earth with the sole purpose of writing this book.
Henning Mankell
#33. It was the most important art a person could learn: self-control.
Henning Mankell
#34. Our ancestors survive somewhere in our faces, she thought. If you look like your mother as a child, you end up as your father when you age. When you no longer recognise your face, it's because an unknown ancestor has taken up residence for a while.
Henning Mankell
#35. The wonderful Mozambican people have endured tremendous misery without losing their dignity and their positive outlook on life. Moreover, they have not lost their will to progress and develop. Mozambique is a country where the people never surrendered.
Henning Mankell
#36. There is always a sacred hour in the theatre - after rehearsals and before performances, in the afternoon, between three and five o'clock. Normally the theatre is empty then, and this is a wonderful hour.
Henning Mankell
#37. In Africa, listening is a guiding principle. It's a principle that's been lost in the constant chatter of the Western world, where no one seems to have the time or even the desire to listen to anyone else.
Henning Mankell
#38. Many people say I smile more in Africa than in Sweden.
Henning Mankell
#39. What scared him more than anything else was an old age spent simply waiting to die, a time when nothing of what had been his life was still possible.
Henning Mankell
#40. When someone asks me to list the 10 best novels ever written, I always refuse to answer.
Henning Mankell
#41. His definition of friendship had been grounded on the lowest common denominator, an absence of animosity. He
Henning Mankell
#42. The truth is never simple. It's only in the Western world that you think knowledge is something you can acquire quickly and easily. It takes time. The truth never hurries.
Henning Mankell
#43. I ask myself everyday what my life is doing to me and I realize I don't have anybody I can talk to."
"You should have" said the Doctor "everybody should.
Henning Mankell
#44. A question that wasn't asked was a question that didn't need an answer.
Henning Mankell
#45. It is as if families on the run are shattered by something other than just grenades. The flight and fear tears us apart and those parts land in all kinds of places - we don't even know where. But we always try to find them afterwards.
Henning Mankell
#46. He had been working with some of them for over fifteen years. It occurred to him that these were people who made up the content of a large proportion of his life. He was now the one who had been working longer than anybody else in the Ystad CID. Once upon a time he'd been the newcomer.
Henning Mankell
#47. Have I ever written anything that has really changed something? What I believe is that you can't change anything without using art. I believe that the drops wear away the stone. I try to be part of that army.
Henning Mankell
#48. Go to Mozambique! As long as you don't expect to find flawless infrastructure, just go. Because this is a country where people have not quite grown accustomed to tourists. You still feel a genuineness that no longer exists in countries where tourism has been industrially developed.
Henning Mankell
#49. I love Sherlock Holmes. There's still an awful lot to steal from Conan Doyle. But within a tradition you can work in many different ways.
Henning Mankell
#51. I work in an old tradition that goes back to the ancient Greeks. You hold a mirror to crime to see what's happening in society. I could never write a crime story just for the sake of it, because I always want to talk about certain things in society.
Henning Mankell
#52. I live with one foot in the sand and one in the snow. There's European egocentricity, and the African opposite. I normally say that my African experience has made me a better European.
Henning Mankell
#53. I can still remember the miraculous feeling of writing a sentence, then more sentences, telling a story. The first thing I wrote was a one-page summary of Robinson Crusoe and I am so sorry I do not have it any more; it was at that moment I became an author.
Henning Mankell
#54. Many words will be written on the wind and the sand, or end up in some obscure digital vault. But the storytelling will go on until the last human being stops listening. Then we can send the great chronicle of humanity out into the endless universe.
Henning Mankell
#55. One of the agonies of being an author is to know when to stop writing.
Henning Mankell
#56. Shakespeare is in many ways an African writer and 'Hamlet' would be seen as a very accurate historical saga about an African kingdom.
Henning Mankell
#57. No doubt you thought I was dead. I sometimes think I am myself.
Henning Mankell
#59. A full description of a person's life, however uneventful or uninteresting, fills a large folder.
Henning Mankell
#60. New love might replace an earlier love, but the old love is always there, no matter what. You live your life on two levels, probably to avoid falling through without a trace if a hole appears in one of them.
Henning Mankell
#61. Each person searches for the most beautiful jump which will be the final before leaving this world.
Henning Mankell
#62. Somewhere in the dark a vast meaninglessness was beckoning to him. A grinning face that laughed scornfully at all his vain attempts to manage his life.
Henning Mankell
#63. Something that makes it possible for me to start thinking about the future again.
Henning Mankell
#64. 'What was that?' Wallander said.
[Linda] 'Nothing.'
'That's funny. I could have sworn you were swearing.'
'I didn't say anything.'
'I have a strange daughter,' Wallander said to Lindman. 'She curses without even knowing it.'
Henning Mankell
#65. Once more they had left their own time for another age. The age of Bellman, the bacchanalian 18th-century poet.
Henning Mankell
#66. Well, I believe that life is very complicated. And in a way, the only way you can show life in a truthful way is to show how complicated it is as an individual, but also your relation between a complicated life and the complications you have inside you.
Henning Mankell
#67. The Christian world had become mired in a bog of misconceptions and had tried God's patience.
Henning Mankell
#68. Linda grabbed an ashtray from the table and threw it at him, hitting him right above the eyebrow. Blood ran down his face and dripped on Harriet Bolson's file.
Henning Mankell
#69. People have faces. [ ... ] Spirits don't have faces. And yet we recognise them. We know who is who. Spirits don't have eyes or mouths or ears either. And yet they can see and speak and hear. [ ... ] The spirits are all around us. [ ... ] They're right here, but we can't see them.
Henning Mankell
#70. The
experience he'd gained during his years in the police force
had given him this unambiguous answer: there are no
murderers. Only ordinary people who commit murder
Henning Mankell
#71. I will baptise her," he said. "You have walked a long way for something you believe in. In our day that is rare. People seldom walk long distances for their faith. That's why the world looks the way it does.
Henning Mankell
#72. For me 'Oliver Twist' is a political novel. It is a furious critique of the treatment of orphans and poor children who were forced to spend their early lives in ghastly institutions.
Henning Mankell
#73. Soul-sucking vampires who were profiting from the increased sense of helplessness in society.
Henning Mankell
#74. It's impossible to talk to a madman wisely, Wallander thought helplessly.
Henning Mankell
#75. When one historical period is replaced by another, there is
always a group of people left over from the old society
Henning Mankell
#76. Working with keys is always meaningful. Locking and opening is, in a sense, man's very purpose on this earth.
Henning Mankell
#77. I'm quite sure Shakespeare enjoyed writing Iago much more than he did writing Othello. If you write about someone you love, what the hell are you supposed to say about that person? It's much better to have something between you and your main character that grates.
Henning Mankell
#78. In a way that starry night sky is a mirror in which we see our own faces.
Henning Mankell
#79. You can't interrupt the process of making a key once you've started. It lets a kind of hesitation into the iron. That happens and the key will never sit well in its lock.
Henning Mankell
#80. there was no such thing as past or future. There was no time that could be lost or won. The only thing that counted was action.
Henning Mankell
#81. To grow up is to wonder about things; to be grown up is to slowly forget the things you wondered about as a child.
Henning Mankell
#82. An African who loses the ability to die with dignity is a lost man.
Henning Mankell
#84. Too often we learn everything about how an African dies, but nothing about how he lives. But they learn and live and love and dream just like we do. That's not to say there are not a hell of a lot of problems in Africa. But there is also another side to that story.
Henning Mankell
#85. You think you know everything about a person, but the truth often comes as a surprise.
Henning Mankell
#86. There's no reality without battles and no future without fights.
Henning Mankell
#87. I came to Mozambique in 1986, when I first became involved with Teatro Avenida - a theatre company that stages plays concerned with political and social issues.
Henning Mankell
#88. I would say that during my lifetime, one of the worst political scandals in Sweden was absolutely what happened surrounding the affair of the submarines in Swedish waters in 1982, where there were supposed to be Russian submarines close to Stockholm. And the military of Sweden never got one up.
Henning Mankell
#89. Novels are ... an unsurpassed form to understand people.
Henning Mankell
#90. Eliminating someone from an investigation is just as important as getting a positive lead.
Henning Mankell
#91. Although I never marched through the streets shouting for Mao, I do believe that the liberation of China at the end of the 1940s was a wonderful thing and to provide its people with a billion pairs of shoes and trousers was a fantastic achievement.
Henning Mankell
#92. Letters ... People do not write the truth; they write the things that, they believe, you would like to read.
Henning Mankell
#93. Normally street children are shown in terms of the tragedy of their lives - which is true - but there's also another dimension: their wisdom, dignity and enormous capacity for survival.
Henning Mankell
#94. A woman would have never been able to live in a house with no pictures of her family,
Henning Mankell
#95. Our exile organizations have been our way of replacing the cities and villages we have lost.
Henning Mankell
#97. At that age, they're as happy as they can be. Life seems endless, the sorrows few.
Henning Mankell
#98. There was a sort of beauty that only comes with age. A whole life engraved into facial wrinkles.
Henning Mankell
#100. He was so excessively polite that Wallendar suspected he had endured many humiliations in his life.
Henning Mankell
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