Henning Mankell

“A história não é só o que deixamos para trás, mas é também algo que nos vai acompanhando ao longo da vida.”

“Погледна ръчния си часовник. Времето ли отминаваше или животът му?”

“Nos quejamos de lo mal que están las cosas, pero yo a veces me pregunto si no están ya mucho peor de lo que nos imaginamos”

“Yo creo que más bien los atrae el saberse en las cercanías de la crueldad , con la tranquilidad de que no es uno el mismo afectado”

“We used to send whole flocks of birds shooting out of our mouths and never managed to grab them by their wings.”

“We live in an age when the mice are hunting the cats...nobody knows who are the mice and who the cats.”

“It’s only when we can work with something that brings out our strengths that we’re of any real use.”

“What doesn’t exist you have to create yourself. Even a dream can be plucked out of your head and shaped for a purpose.”

“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.”

“The forest has been growing for hundreds of years. Each time a child is born, a tree is planted. You could see from his tree how old a person was. The tall and thick tree trunks, which gave the most shade, belonged to people who had already returned to the spirit world. But the trees of the living and the dead stood in the same grove, sought their nourishment from the same soil and the same rain. They stood there waiting for the children that were not yet born, the trees that had not yet been planted. In that way the forest would grow, and the age of the village would be visible for all time. No one could tell from a tree whether someone was dead, only that he had been born.”

“Do you know what the wind tastes like? […] Mysterious spices […] that tell us about people and events far away. That we can’t see. But that we can sense if we draw the wind deep into our mouths and then eat it.”

“Dreams can be of value even if you don’t have an opportunity to turn them into reality.”

“The evil always comes from details.”

“There will always be new opposites, class struggles and uprisings. History has no ending.”

“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.”

“New ideas are always resisted.”

“There's no reality without battles and no future without fights.”

“The truth changes all the time.”

“Big changes don't happen at the battlefield; they are made in closed rooms where very powerful people decide in which direction things should go.”

“A journalist who doesn't know how to find a phone number no matter how secret it is should change his profession.”

“A life is a constant quest how to achieve the best result.”

“There’s always an end. But the end is always the beginning of something else. The periods we write into our lives are always provisional, in one way or another.”

“History can never give us exact knowledge of what will happen in the future: rather, it shows us that our ability to prepare ourselves for change is limited.”

“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.”

“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.”

“If a policeman is serious about his profession but says he has time, he lies.”

“Letters...People do not write the truth; they write the things that, they believe, you would like to read.”

“This is what Sweden is - quiet people leaning over the newspapers and coffee cups, each one with his own thoughts and destiny.”

“I know paradise has many gates, just as hell does. One has to learn to distinguish between them, or one is lost.”

“Our exile organizations have been our way of replacing the cities and villages we have lost.”

“He was so excessively polite that Wallendar suspected he had endured many humiliations in his life.”

“What annoys a person who suicides? The life itself. Boredom. Tiredness that descends on every morning when you look at yourself at the mirror.”

“It's impossible to talk to a madman wisely, Wallander thought helplessly.”

“Things are as they are.”

“‎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.”

“‎The game had started. Everybody was assuring everybody else how reliable they were. In fact, nobody trusted anybody but themselves”

“one must occasionally stand the world onits head in order to put it on its feet.”

“Every secret we confide in anotherperson can be a burden to them”

“Theexperience he'd gained during his years in the police forcehad given him this unambiguous answer: there are nomurderers. Only ordinary people who commit murder”

“When one historical period is replaced by another, there isalways a group of people left over from the old society”

“I'm a religious man," he said. "I don't believe in a particularGod, but even so one can have a faith, something beyondthe limits of rationality. Marxism has a large element ofbuilt-in faith, although it claims to be a science and notmerely an ideology. This is my first visit to the West: untilnow I have only been able to go to the Soviet Union orPoland or the Baltic states. In your country I see anabundance of material things. It seems to be unlimited. Butthere's a difference between our countries that is also asimilarity. Both are poor. You see, poverty has differentfaces. We lack the abundance that you have, and we don'thave the freedom of choice. In your country I detect a kind of poverty, which is that you do not need to fight for yoursurvival. For me the struggle has a religious dimension, andI would not want to exchange that for your abundance.”

“Every time Wallander stepped into someone's home, he felt as though he were looking at the front cover of a book that he had just bought”

“in a rash moment he decided to lie his way to the truth. If he wasn't mistaken, Ellen Magnusson had had very little experience with the police. She would assume that they searched for the truth by being honest themselves. She was the one who would lie, not the police.”

“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.”

“Many people make the mistake of confusing information with knowledge. They are not the same thing. Knowledge involves the interpretation of information. Knowledge involves listening.”

“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."[As quoted in the author biography on Mankell's official website.]”

“Among all the nonsense, mistakes, and bad ideas we come up with, maybe some truth will sneak in.”

“Those who contemplate never escape the doubt.”

“Not everything can go according to the plan.”

“Someone must lead the way.”