Henning Mankell Quotes

Time is so much a part of what makes you close to people.

Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together.

And then I feel as if I'm witnessing a miracle, as ever so slowly she raises her face towards the moon. I watch her drink in the sight, sensing the flood of memories she's unleashed and wanting nothing more than to let her know I'm here. But instead I stay where I am and stare up at the moon as well. And for the briefest instant, it almost feels like we're together again.

He reached across and fingered the pendant; I felt it move against my skin. "Willow, look," He said. "We haven't talked much about what might happen, but...you know that I always want to be with you, right? I mean--no matter what." And I had known it; I felt it every time he held me--but even so, actually hearing the words made my heart catch. "I want that, too," I said. "Always, Alex.

It feels good to think about you when I'm warm in bed. I feel as if you're curled up there beside me, fast asleep. And I think how great it would be if it were true.

Every conversation, every cuddle, aver kiss and caress, even every disagreement, adds another brushstroke to the picture of home you paint with the days and hours of your life.

To see something marvelous with your own eyes-that's wonderful enough. But when two of you see it, two of you together, holding hands, holding each other close, knowing that you'll both have that memory for the rest of your lives, but that each of you will only ever hold only have an incomplete half of it, and that it won't ever really exist as a whole until you're together, talking or thinking about that moment ...that's worth more than one plus one. It's worth four, or eight, or some number so large we can't even imagine it.

What brings two people together anyway?

We want to be in open, loving communion with each other and our greatest fear is intimacy. That it won't work and we'll be rejected.

We need to be together, and love each other.

All I want is to preserve that wonderful something which so purely exists between us.

Had we less to say to those we love, perhaps we should say it oftener.

They spent their time doing nothing... they let intimacy fuse them.

True silence is the speech of lovers.

Only he who loves and is loved for his own sake can be happy, and what produces that happiness is not so much the sense of sexual communion as of two people being together ... the sexual act viewed as a whole probably affords less happiness than a totally ordinary kiss or often indeed one simple word from the one you love.

I don't know. I really don't. While I was in the living room, I kept asking myself what I really wanted in life." She squeezed his hand. "And do you know what the answer was? The answer was that I wanted two things. First, I want you. I want us. I love you and I always have.

For my own part, I would rather be in company with a dead man than with an absent one; for if the dead man gives me no pleasure, at least he shows me no contempt; whereas the absent one, silently indeed, but very plainly, tells me that he does not think me worth his attention.

If you can sit in silence with a person for half an hour and yet be entirely comfortable, you and that person can be friends. If you cannot, friends you'll never be and you need not waste time in trying.

Pray with your woman, sing with your woman, play with your woman, dance with your woman, with no idea of sex.

Love is sharing your popcorn.

We didn't talk about anything heavy or light. We were just there together. And that was enough

The most loving thing to do is to share your bed with someone.

We perceive when love begins and when it declines by our embarrassment when alone together.

How joyful to be together, alone as when we first were joined in our little house by the river long ago, except that now we know each other, as we did not then; and now instead of two stories fumbling to meet, we belong to one story that the two, joining, made. And now we touch each other with the tenderness of mortals, who know themselves

Kevin stopped where he was and stood there simply gazing at her. Molly sat cross-legged in the meadow with the sun shining on her bare shoulders and a pair of yellow butterflies fluttering like hair bows around her head. She was all the dreams he'd lost at dawn-dreams of everything he hadn't understood he needed until now. She was his playmate, his confidante, the lover who made his blood rush. She was the mother of his children and the companion of his old age. She was the joy of his heart.