Henning Mankell Quotes

The stories I create are never as awful as reality.

— Henning Mankell

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

— Henning Mankell

“I remembered her once saying that life was like your shoes. You couldn't simply expect or imagine that your shoes would fit perfectly. Shoes that pinched your feet were a fact of life.”

— Henning Mankell

“-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

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

— Henning Mankell

“You think you know everything about a person, but the truth often comes as a surprise.”

— Henning Mankell

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

— Henning Mankell

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

— Henning Mankell

“Life is a flimsy branch over an abyss.”

— Henning Mankell

Each person searches for the most beautiful jump which will be the final before leaving this world.

— Henning Mankell

“You can have more than one home. You can carry your roots with you, and decide where they grow.”

— Henning Mankell

“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

“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

“An oppressed people will always rise.”

— Henning Mankell

“Sweden is still a very peaceful country to live in. I think that people in Britain have created this mythology about Sweden, that it's a perfect democratic society full of erotically charged girls.”

— Henning Mankell

“When you are around 60, there are certain things that are completely terrifying. One of them is that you have made the wrong choices in life, and now it's too late to do anything about them.”

— Henning Mankell

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

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

— Henning Mankell

Not everything can go according to the plan.

— Henning Mankell

“We're living as if we were in mourning for a lost paradise, he thought. As if we longed for the car thieves and safecrackers of the old days, who doffed their caps and behaved like gentlemen when we came to take them in. But those days have irretrievably vanished, and it's questionable whether they were ever as idyllic as we remember them.”

— Henning Mankell

“There was a sort of beauty that only comes with age. A whole life engraved into facial wrinkles.”

— Henning Mankell

New ideas are always resisted.

— Henning Mankell

“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.”

— Henning Mankell

“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

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

— Henning Mankell

“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

“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

“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

The great Danish-Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose once said, liberally translated, the only things worth writing about are love and murder.

— Henning Mankell

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

— Henning Mankell

“The Christian world had become mired in a bog of misconceptions and had tried God's patience.”

— Henning Mankell

“We only have the past that we have. Not all of our deeds were incorrect.”

— Henning Mankell

His definition of friendship had been grounded on the lowest common denominator, an absence of animosity. He

— Henning Mankell

“A question that wasn't asked was a question that didn't need an answer.”

— Henning Mankell

“A dead black man-nothing to bother about.”

— Henning Mankell

“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

“You have a good father. She was taken aback.”

— Henning Mankell

“Under it all was quagmire.”

— Henning Mankell

Once more they had left their own time for another age. The age of Bellman, the bacchanalian 18th-century poet.

— Henning Mankell

At what point does the normal suddenly become the abnormal? he

— Henning Mankell

“An African who loses the ability to die with dignity is a lost man.”

— Henning Mankell

Eliminating someone from an investigation is just as important as getting a positive lead.

— Henning Mankell

“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

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

“My mother did what many men do. She left.”

— Henning Mankell

“Novels are ... an unsurpassed form to understand people.”

— Henning Mankell