Top 90 Henning Mankell Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I do not understand how on earth you can become a writer without seeing the world.”

— Henning Mankell

52. “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

53. “I’m not very much of a reader really, because I find much of it very bad, very uninteresting, very speculative.”

— Henning Mankell

54. “Growing older meant losing a little bit of energy every single day. And one day it would be completely gone.”

— Henning Mankell

55. “When someone asks me to list the 10 best novels ever written, I always refuse to answer.”

— Henning Mankell

56. “All the Wallander books are basically a discussion on the relationship between democracy and the system of justice.”

— Henning Mankell

57. “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

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

— Henning Mankell

59. “Recalling the dream was like trying to follow a ship into fog.”

— Henning Mankell

60. “One of the agonies of being an author is to know when to stop writing.”

— Henning Mankell

61. “History isn’t just something that’s being us, it’s also something that follows us.”

— Henning Mankell

62. “Life took on quite a special meaning in this early morning solitude.”

— Henning Mankell

63. “Hate can blind people in the same way envy can. Or jealousy. – Kurt Wallander.”

— Henning Mankell

64. “It was only in the Western world that old people were viewed with indulgence or contemptuous sympathy. In other cultures, age was respected as the period of enlightened wisdom.”

— Henning Mankell

65. “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

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

— Henning Mankell

67. “I can’t deal with angry people until after I’ve had my morning coffee.”

— Henning Mankell

68. “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

69. “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

70. “No doubt you thought I was dead. I sometimes think I am myself.”

— Henning Mankell

71. “It occurred to Wallander that no matter when death comes, it disrupts everything. Death always arrives at the wrong time – something is left undone.”

— Henning Mankell

72. “She almost blended in with the wall, dissolved, faded. Could a person become so pale that she was no longer visible?”

— Henning Mankell

73. “A full description of a person’s life, however uneventful or uninteresting, fills a large folder.”

— Henning Mankell

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

— Henning Mankell

75. “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

76. “Despite everything, I’ve tried to take responsibility for my life, and not merely allowed it to float away at the mercy of whatever current came along.”

— Henning Mankell

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

80. “I’m afraid I am hopelessly, furiously envious of all those who will continue to live when I am dead. I am equally embarrassed and terrified by the thought. I try to deny it, but it recurs with increasing frequency the older I get.”

— Henning Mankell

81. “There is a special kind of beauty that manifests itself only in the faces of very old women. Their furrowed skin contains all the marks and memories imprinted by a life lived. Old women whose bodies the earth is crying out to embrace.”

— Henning Mankell

82. “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

83. “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

84. “You can’t live with literary characters no matter how much you might like to. You can have them as imaginary friends that you can call up when you need to. One of the tasks of art is to provide people with companions.”

— Henning Mankell

85. “Having the possibility to make decisions about what to do with one’s life is a great privilege. As far as most people on this planet are concerned, life is simply about survival.”

— Henning Mankell

86. “The stories I create are never as awful as reality.”

— Henning Mankell

87. “Sorrow and respect didn’t follow a color scheme.”

— Henning Mankell

88. “It was the most important art a person could learn: self-control.”

— Henning Mankell

89. “We’re not allowed to learn to die,’ Jansson said. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘In the past death was a part of life. Now it’s completely separate. I remember I was six years old when my grandmother died. Her body lay on a door in the parlour at home. There was nothing odd about that. Death was a natural part of our lives. Not any more. We no longer learn to die in this country.”

— Henning Mankell

90. “Each room has its own life and breath. You have to listen for it. A room can tell you many secrers about the person who lives there. – Rydberg.”

— Henning Mankell

91. “Good intentions that are not clothed in reason lead to greater disasters than those actions built on ill will or stupidity.”

— Henning Mankell