After the Fire Quotes

“We can never make sense of death,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t obey any laws or follow any rules. Death is an intractable anarchist.”
― Henning Mankell, After the Fire

“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, After the Fire

“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, After the Fire

“Growing older meant losing a little bit of energy every single day. And one day it would be completely gone.”
― Henning Mankell, After the Fire

“sandwich.”
― Henning Mankell, After the Fire

“call. I spent the next few hours playing poker with myself. It’s the saddest expression of loneliness I know. I never feel more overwhelmed by weariness and unhappiness than when I’m trying to win money off myself. There is no deeper form of isolation.”
― Henning Mankell, After the Fire

“remembered him coming home after long shifts and immediately sitting down at the kitchen table, forcing my mother to listen to his complaints about all his difficult colleagues and the maître d’s, not to mention the diners he had to put up with. I never heard him accept responsibility for any tricky situation that had arisen; it was always the other person who had been in the wrong. When I was a child, I thought my father was an amazing man who never made any mistakes, but as time went on I realised that of course he was simply blaming someone else. That was also why he burdened himself with what sometimes seemed like a bottomless sorrow over a life that had turned out to be a failure.”
― Henning Mankell, After the Fire

“Even”
― Henning Mankell, After the Fire

“I couldn’t for the life of me understand why I should stop communicating with old friends just because they were dead.”
― Henning Mankell, After the Fire

“My grandfather had dominated my childhood out on the island, but my grandmother had been there too, providing the security I didn’t recognise or value until I was an adult.”
― Henning Mankell, After the Fire

“I couldn’t feel the unreserved joy I should be experiencing, which worried me. Why did I carry my emotions as if they were a burden?”
― Henning Mankell, After the Fire

“I was beginning to suspect that the fire had destroyed something inside me. People can have load-bearing beams that give way too.”
― Henning Mankell, After the Fire

“Growing older is like walking on thinner and thinner ice.”
― Henning Mankell, After the Fire

“In the biological world children are the sole purpose. Nothing else matters.”
― Henning Mankell, After the Fire

“Trusting what a person says is always a risk. The truth is always provisional, while lies are often solid.”
― Henning Mankell, After the Fire

“Even as a ten-year-old, the incident made it clear to me that people are never completely what we believe they are. Including me. There is always something unexpected within those we meet, those we think we have got to know.”
― Henning Mankell, After the Fire

“Growing older was like a mist silently drifting across the sea.”
― Henning Mankell, After the Fire