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.