The White Lioness Quotes

“‎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, The White Lioness

“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, The White Lioness

“It was a feeling which stayed with him after he got back home to his terrace house on the Kristianstad road. When he had finished his dinner and played with his children for a while, he went out with the dog. Martinsson lived in the neighbourhood, so he decided to stop by and tell he and Noren had seen. The dog was a Labrador bitch and Martinsson had asked recently if he could join the waiting list for puppies.”
― Henning Mankell, The White Lioness

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

“There are no guarantees in this life. There are only risks.”
― Henning Mankell, The White Lioness

“The decision had been made four months earlier. They met in this very house, which was owned by the South African army and used for conferences and meetings that required privacy. Officially neither BOSS nor the military had any links with secret societies. Their loyalty was formally bound to the sitting government and the South African constitution. But the reality was quite different. Just as when the Broederbond was at its peak, Jan Kleyn and Franz Malan had contacts throughout South African society. The operation they had planned on behalf of The Committee and were now ready to set in motion was based in the high command of the South African army, the Inkatha movement that opposed the ANC, and among well-placed businessmen and bank officials.”
― Henning Mankell, The White Lioness

“It’s often the case that the sick person is the one who has to console whoever it is he or she tells.”
― Henning Mankell, The White Lioness

“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, The White Lioness

“People who go off somewhere and then come back again are seldom any better off for their adventure. They’re fooling themselves. They haven’t come to terms with the ancient truth that you can never run away from yourself.”
― Henning Mankell, The White Lioness

“The truth is complicated, multi-faceted, contradictory. On the other hand, lies are black and white. If one’s view of humans, of human life, is disrespectful and contemptuous, then truth takes on another aspect than if life is regarded as inviolable.”
― Henning Mankell, The White Lioness

“Could it be that submissiveness is the most difficult of all human failings to shake off? It’s a habit so deeply ingrained, it deforms one’s whole being and leaves no part of the body untouched. Progressing from being a nobody to being a somebody is the longest journey a human being can undertake. Once you’ve learned to put up with your inferiority, it becomes a habit which dominates your whole life.”
― Henning Mankell, The White Lioness

“Luulemme että voimme jarruttaa kehitystä kieltäytymällä näkemästä sitä.”
― Henning Mankell, The White Lioness

“Kertomus on matka, joka ei lopu koskaan.”
― Henning Mankell, The White Lioness

“Jos ihmisellä ei ole aikaa olla toisen kanssa, jollei hän pysty istumaan hiljaa toisen seurassa, hän hylkää, torjuu ja pilkkaa.”
― Henning Mankell, The White Lioness

“He always put off the most important matters affecting his own life. When he was at work, on the other hand, he insisted on arguing for precisely the opposite approach. Always do the most important things first. He had a split personality.”
― Henning Mankell, The White Lioness

“Tutte le domande continuano a rimanere senza risposta, pensò. Passo la mia vita a cercare di assicurare alla giustizia dei criminali che hanno commesso una serie di reati. Ogni tanto ci riesco, ma il più delle volte fallisco. Ma quando arriverò alla fine della mia vita dovrò constatare di avere fallito in quella che è la più importante delle ricerche. Quel mistero stravagante che è la vita rimarrà irrisolto.”
― Henning Mankell, The White Lioness

“At a time which seemed to him as far distant as the dim and distant past of his ancestors, his father, Okumana, the man who could make better spear tips than anyone else, had explained to him that there was always a way out of any situation, as long as one was alive. Death was the last hiding place. That was something to keep in reserve until there was no other way of avoiding an apparently insuperable threat. There were always escape routes that were not immediately obvious, and that was why humans, unlike animals, had a brain. In order to look inward, not outward. Inward, toward the secret places where the spirits of one’s ancestors were waiting to act as a man’s guide through life. Who am I? he thought. A human being who has lost his identity is no longer a human being. He is an animal. That’s what has happened to me. I started to kill people because I myself was dead. When I was a child and saw the signs, the accursed signs telling the blacks where they were allowed to go and what existed exclusively for the whites, I started to be diminished even then. A child should grow, grow bigger; but in my country a black child had to learn how to grow smaller and smaller. I saw my parents succumb to their own invisibility, their own accumulated bitterness. I was an obedient child and learned to be a nobody among nobodies. Apartheid was my real father. I learned what no one should need to learn. To live with falsehood, contempt, a lie elevated to the only truth in my country. A lie enforced by the police and laws, but above all by a flood of white water, a torrent of words about the natural differences between white and black, the superiority of white civilization. That superiority turned me into a murderer, songoma. And I can believe this is the ultimate consequence of learning to grow smaller and smaller as a child. For what has this apartheid, this falsified white superiority been but a systematic plundering of our souls? When our despair exploded in furious”
― Henning Mankell, The White Lioness

“KGB might have replaced the songoma in this Russian empire, where no citizen was allowed to believe in holy spirits except in great secrecy. It seemed to him that a society that attempted to put the gods to flight would be doomed. The nkosis know that in my homeland, and hence our gods have not been threatened by apartheid. They can live freely and have never been subjected to the pass laws; they have always been able to move around without being humiliated. If our holy spirits had been banished to remote prison islands, and our singing hounds chased out into the Kalahari Desert, not a single white man, woman or child would have survived in South Africa. All of them, Afrikaners as well as Englishmen, would have been annihilated long ago and their miserable skeletons buried in the red soil. In the old days, when his ancestors were still fighting openly against the white intruders, the Zulu warriors used to cut off their fallen victims’ lower jaw. An impi returning from a victorious battle would bring with him these jawbones as trophies to adorn the temple entrances of their tribal chiefs. Now it was the gods who were on the front line against the whites, and they would never submit to defeat. The first night in the strange”
― Henning Mankell, The White Lioness

“I have to say it all sounds pretty improbable,” said Björk. “We live in an improbable world,” said Wallander.”
― Henning Mankell, The White Lioness

“There are two kinds of dangerous situations. One is the kind you get yourself into. The other just sucks you in.”
― Henning Mankell, The White Lioness

“We all have our peculiarities,” said Wallander.”
― Henning Mankell, The White Lioness

“Diede un colpetto al microfono. Preferiva il classico “gelato” da impugnare piuttosto che quelli più piccoli da appuntare addosso. Le dava un aria da giornalista d’assalto e soprattutto le evitava che Alfio il cameraman, per “microfonarla”, si prendesse qualche libertà di troppo.
<< Allora Alfio, inizi inquadrando il fumo delle ciminiere, poi dopo cinque o sei secondi vieni su di me. >>
<< Eh, magàra … >>
<< Che hai detto? >>”
― Giuliano Pavone, L'eroe dei due mari

“<< Pierangelo rispose, e parlo a lungo. Resto immobile, accovacciato sulla sabbia sporca di cicche e cartacce, incurante dei Super Santos che gli sibilavano a pochi centimetri dalla testa e dei vastasi che li inseguivano. >>”
― Giuliano Pavone, L'eroe dei due mari

“<< La telefonata durò una decina di minuti durante i quali il tarantolato ostacolò a più riprese una coppia di giocatori di racchettoni, distrusse dalle fondamenta un castello di sabbia senza chiedere scusa, e fu colpito alla spalla – non si sa se dolosamente – da un pallone marca Super Tele azzurro e nero. >>”
― Giuliano Pavone, L'eroe dei due mari

“<< Santino – fisico alla Belushi, capelli alla Jim Morrison, età indefinibile, come del resto si addice ai miti del cinema e del Rock – aveva la singolare abilità di non essere mai dove doveva. Il suo non era proprio assenteismo, perché lui al lavoro ci andava quasi sempre. Non abusava dei certificati medici e aveva pure accumulato un sacco di ferie perché, diceva, “che me ne fotte a me di andare in vacanza?” >>”
― Giuliano Pavone, L'eroe dei due mari