Note.19 When the snow fell - Henning Mankell

Thoughts and dreams came from the same place. From somewhere inside yourself, from an underground cave system deep down in your head. Thinking was harder than dreaming. You would have to make an effort in order to think. Dreaming was the opposite. You couldn't do it if you made an effort.

Feelings were like doors. Sorrow had its own room, so did disappointment, and happiness. Life was like a long corridor. Every door you walked past concealed something you could choose to accept. Or reject. If you knocked on the door and went in. Always assuming you were allowed in. But doors you hoped would remain closed could also open unexpectedly.

New year wishes

Each time new year coming, people like to give wishes to each other. The New year comes but the wishes are always the same. The elders always know which wishes for each case. The kids also gradually learnt by heart all the wishes about long life, healthy and prosperity and tried to compete to get more red "lixi". I don't blame them just the more getting the wishes the more vacant, emptiness and a little bored feelings increased. I kept on wondering how people can get healthier, happier and more prosperious if they keep on being safety and staying in the same place, doing the same thing, meeting the same people. The thing people needed each every new year is the braveness the courage and daring big enough to try to experiment the new one, the one people always want to do in their whole life and at least give it a try, meet the new ones and be ready to give up the old ones, the bored ones taking and eating them days after days. Each new experiment is really the one will etch in life making life more remarkable not the tasteless safety days. Each new year coming, new experiment coming, New eagerness coming.

Messages in the bottle

Recalling childhood time I used to wish picking up a bottle with messages when strolling at the seaside. The curiosity plus imagination about some remote lands, strange people excited me each time going to the sea finding the bottles with messages. Till now I have never picked any bottle. Instead I wrote my messages, my thoughts and put in my bottle here - my blog and threw into the vast sea of web information. And like the bottles with messages in real life, the thrown one could not and should not be taken back. So am I. Some even erase theirs and took back their messages just because the "pickers-readers" protested or pissed it. I won't never do that. It can unplease people sometimes but it is mine and it's life with variety of thoughts, ideas, viewpoints so just please respect that. My messages never intend to please anyone's taste (sorry). It is just a sharing thought of the one having endless eager in reading, in experimenting new things, exploring new places and Now .. Who will pick up my bottle? Welcome.

Note.18 Italian Shoes' Quoted - Henning Mankell

When the shoe fits, you don't think about the foot.

There are two sorts of truth: trivialities, where the opposite is obviously impossible, and deep truths, which are characterised by their opposite also being a deep truth.

Love is a gentle hand which slowly pushes fate to one side.

Life is not about cut prices. Life is basically about something more important. I don't know what exactly but, nevertheless, one must believe that it is important, and that the hidden meaning is something more substantial than discount coupons and scratch cards.

We' re always being made promises. You make them yourself and you listen to others giving theirs. Politicians are always going on about providing a better quality of life for people as they get older, and a health service in which nobody ever gets bedsores. Banks promise you high interest rates, some food promises to make you lose weight if you eat it, and body creams guarantee old age with fewer wrinkles. Life is quite simply a matter of cruising along in your own little boat through a constantly changing but never-ending stream of promises. And how many do we remember? We forget the ones we would like to remember, and we remember the ones we'd prefer to forget. Broken promises are like shadows dancing around in the twilight. The older I become, the more clearly I see them.

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.

Of course I'm going to die. We all reach a point where we no longer have the strength to deny what's going to happen. Death is the only constant companion a human being can have in this life. Even a lunatic usually knows when it's time to go.

I've felt cold all my life. I've gone looking for warmth in deserts and tropical countries. But all the time I've had a little icicle hanging inside me. People always have baggage. For some it's sorrow, for others it's worry. For me, it's always been an icicle.

There are always humiliating moments in the life of every woman. What most of us find worst is what happened when we were very young.

Truth is often stranger than fiction.

There are remarkable people living everywhere, but nobody notices them because they're old. We live in an age when old people are supposed to be as transparent as a sheet of glass. It's best if we don't even notice that they exist. You are becoming more and more transparent as well.

It's just as easy to lose your way inside yourself as it is to get lost in the woods or in a city.

Good shoes help a person to forget about his feet. Nobody travels through life on a table or on a sheet of paper. Feet and the ground are linked together.

To make a difference that's so small it's not even noticeable. But it's a difference, for all that.

There's no such thing as normal people. That's a twisted view of the world that politicians want us to believe. That we are all a part of an endless mass of normality, with no possibility, never mind desire to claim that we are different.

If you live long enough, you'll realise that nothing is impossible.

Death wipes out everything that has lived. Death leaves no trace, apart from the things I've always found so difficult to cope with.

If you dig too deeply into others, you can risk destroying a beautiful friendship.

Henning Mankell's

Mankell's first story i read is "The Dogs of Riga", a Vietnamese translation one. I read it because the name of the book interested me. I really did not like it much. Anyway I tried the second one "One Step Behind" and this really shocked and attracted me. I like it so much. And then like an addict, I have been finding all of his books, the later in Vietnam was "Firewall" also in Vietnamese translated one. And now in Canada I have really really so good opportunities to read Mankell's other books. Now of course also translation but in English version. I am so happy. He is really a great great author I admire. More and more I become Mankell's big fan.

Below are what i read:
1. The Dogs of Riga

2. One Step Behind

3. Firewall

4. The Pyramids

5. Faceless Killers

6. Sidetracked

7. The White Linoness

8. The Man Who Smiled

9. The Return of The Dancing master

10. Before the Frost

11. Kennedy's Brain

12. The Troubled Man

13. Depths

14. Chronicler of The Winds

15. A bridge to the Stars

16. Shadows in the Twilight

17. When the Snow Fell

18. Journey to the end of the world

19. Italian Shoes

20. The man from Beijing

Note.17 Kennedy's Brain quoted - Henning Mankell

Defeat should be out in the open, they shouldn't be hidden away, for it is defeats that make one a human being. A man who never understands his defeats takes nothing with him into the future.

Sorrow was like mice, it always found a way in.

Death was darkness, there was no light to be found there. Death was attics and cellars, it smelled raw, of mice and soil, and loneliness.

I never received any money from my parents. I still thank them for that even today. Nothing can spoil children more than giving them something they ought to earn for themselves.

They don't know what my name is, or where i live. There's a difference between knowing somebody, and recognising somebody. They're at ease because my face isn't that of a stranger. I belong here. They don't want to know any more than that, really. It's enough for me to be somebody who keeps calling in at the shop, doesn't cause trouble and pays his bills.

He does like to go back to places he's been to before. That's something that splits humanity into two groups - those who hate going back, and those who love it. You know where I belong. What about you?

Better to light a candle than to rant against darkness

If you want to be alone, think of me as an extra shadow. A sort of jacket you take with you over your arm when you're not sure if it's going to rain or not.

The lantern in the hand of Diogenes. I now realise that I'm living in an age where the concealment of truths has been elevated to an art as well as a science. Truths that always used to be allowed to emerge as a matter of course are nowadays being kept secret. Without a lantern in your hand, it is practically impossible to find somebody you're looking for. Cold gusts of wind extinguish the lantern's flame. You then have a choice: let it stay out, or light it again. And carry on looking for people.

Living means having the will to resist.

I know that there are gods for sale or for borrowing when the pain becomes too great, but that way has never brought me any consolation

If you don't learn the basic essentials of how an engine works, and what you can repair yourself, you're not fit to hold a driving licence.

People hardly ever have a conscience. Poor people don't because they can't afford it. Rich people don't because they think that if they do, it will cost them money.

My mother has never told a single lie in all her life. For her there is nothing but the truth. My father has always told her lies, about other women he claimed didn't exist, about money he'd earned but lost. He's lied about everything apart from the fact that he would never have survived if she hadn't been there by his side. Men tell lies. - So do women. - They do it in self-defence. Men have declared war on women in so many ways. One of their most common weapons is lies.

We forgot too easily that people all belong to the same family. And that every landscape has something that reminds you of other landscapes. If it's true that we all came originally from Africa, that must mean that we all had a black mother long, long ago.

We know all about how Africans die, but hardly anything about how they live.

I don't believe it's possible to share one's grief with anybody else. One is alone with one's grief, just as one is alone when one dies.

It's never good to die before you've finished saying what you have to say.

What is written in this book is exclusively the result of my own choices and decisions, of course. Just as the anger is also mine, the anger that was my driving force.