The Man From Beijing Quotes
"A man on a snowmobile thinks he might have glimpsed it just outside Fjällnäs, but the wolf vanishes into the trees heading east before he is able to pinpoint it."
"His sharp ears can’t detect the slightest sound."
"The silence is total this freezing cold morning."
"He recognised the picture. It was black and white and depicted a man sitting on an old iron bed, with a hunting rifle hanging on the wall and a chamber pot at his feet."
"It was the ninth and final day of his journey."
"Silent people, poring over their newspapers with a cup of coffee, absorbed in their own thoughts, their own fates."
"Then he told Ytterstrom to stop. Something lying in the snow by one of the houses had attracted his attention."
"She ran a hand through her hair and looked hard at Erik Huddén."
"Her head was almost totally severed from her neck."
"The old woman sat at the kitchen table, looking out of the window."
"The moment she stepped outside, she filled her lungs with fresh air."
"The houses seemed to return her attentive gaze."
"A man and a woman had met in one of Helsingborg’s dance restaurants."
"I can’t shake the feeling that on this occasion a guilty man would go free."
"The number didn’t tally. They were a name short."
"The overcast sky from the previous day had begun to open up."
"Anker, the old district judge, who made an indelible impression on her."
"It was cool in the cellar. She checked that the temperature was fourteen degrees Celsius."
"She paused and read the text carefully, then checked in the other paper."
"It's not words that are important, but the steps you need to take to get to Canton."
"Every word you shout robs you of one footstep."
"The gods in the trees and the streams and the mountains had created the world we humans lived in."
"The poor steal from the poor, even an empty water flask is desirable to somebody who has nothing."
"Life was not just a matter of understanding, but also of bringing about change."
"Memory is like glass. A person who has died is still visible, very close. But we can no longer contact each other."
"The stars provided some consolation for the hard life she led."
"What lay in store for them in Canton, where they were headed? It was said that you could smuggle yourself aboard a ship and be carried eastward over the ocean to a country where there were rivers filled with glittering gold nuggets the size of hens' eggs."
"We are like dogs, everybody kicks us, we have to live on what others throw away."
9179812
9179812
"San made up his mind as the sun began to set. They must have food, or they would die."
"He could see his parents in his mind’s eye, hanging from the tree that awful morning."
"Curiosity is a human virtue. Anybody who doesn’t have an enquiring mind is unlikely to live a satisfying life."
"San was the only one still sitting, staring at the flames."
"They must look strong. Nobody gives work to men with no strength in their arms and legs."
"The shattering truth struck home: Wu was dead, and San had failed to protect him."
"San had made up his mind that their only chance of surviving was to escape."
"The passage of time was relentless and capricious, and one would lose the battle with it in the end."
"Doing business and making political decisions were a sort of warfare, and all that mattered was cool, rational calculation."
"The whole of China was overshadowed by the injustice of the past."
"My sister is warning me, Ya Ru thought. Or perhaps challenging me. Which path shall I choose to follow for the rest of my life?"
"I’m dying too soon. But even if I lived to be a thousand, I would still die too soon as I would not have succeeded in restoring our family’s honour. I did what I could, but it was not enough."
"It’s time for you to leave, Liu Xin. The beginning of the Western New Year is the most appropriate time for you to carry out your task."
"If you fail, I beg you not to return here. If you did, I would have to kill you."
"The great events that would soon take place would not be proclaimed in this square in the Middle Kingdom."
"The new world order would develop in deepest silence. Until it was no longer possible to prevent what was going to happen."
"It struck her that neither she nor the police had begun to understand the scope of what had happened. It was bigger, more profound, more mysterious, than they could possibly have realised."
"She realised that they were at a crucial stage in the investigation."
"I’ve smoked so many cigarettes that if they were laid out end to end they would stretch from the centre of Stockholm to somewhere south of Södertälje."
"It’s as if the whole world is falling apart. And our courts are pretty useless when it comes to preserving any kind of moral decency in this country."
"A life, she thought. My death could look the same; my diary, if I had kept one, would be unfinished."
"My high blood pressure is ticking away like a time bomb inside me."
"Every day I have to make an effort to overcome my worries."
"We shall have to wait and see. And you must make sure to get better soon."
"If the crime doesn’t make sense, the motive doesn’t need to either."
"The current upswing of the peasants’ revolt is of enormous significance."
"Freedom and safety are always jostling for position."
"In tense, dangerous situations you see through the back of your head."
"Understanding its creed meant slowly waking up that inner god."
"It’s not about my case, she thought. The police are searching my room for other reasons."
"If there are enough of you, you can be convinced of anything at all."
"Being a Communist meant fighting against destitution and poverty."
"Big changes do not take place on the battlefield, they happen behind locked doors."
"There is no reality without struggle, no future without battles."
"The future of China could only be fashioned by cooperation with the world around it."
"If we don’t make the change, or if we make the wrong one, there is a serious risk that unrest could break out."
"Nobody wants to die surrounded by the noise from machines and radios."
"We know that we can never attain an everlasting paradise to call our own. If we do believe that, paradise becomes a trap."
"The questions you want to ask me can wait. Or perhaps I should call them complaints?"
"We are starting to get old, Hong Qiu. Like all old people, you’re frightened of anything new."
"The only plausible reason for her being present on this visit was that she was one of many in the Communist Party who were skeptical about current policies."
"Perhaps it was all part of a plan that she knew nothing about?"
"The poor are always there, she thought – the ones whose interests we say we are looking after."
"We can't apply our way of looking at things to China."
"If you want to make an omelette, you have to break an egg."
"There's no way that this can happen: four million, perhaps more, of our poorest peasants migrating to the African wilderness."
"Ya Ru had once visited him in the Red Manor he had built in his home district of Xiamen."
"I think about my dear friend Hong Qiu every day."
"Our lives are totally different. I'm a civil servant; you do big business deals that we read about in the newspapers."
"I don’t think about it. I’ve put it behind me."
"I hardly know what you’re thinking any more. I sometimes look at you in the morning and think that you’re a stranger."
"The truth is never simple. It’s only in the Western world that you think knowledge is something you can acquire quickly and easily. It takes time. The truth never hurries."
"The day we stop searching for the truth, which is never objective but under the best circumstances built on facts, is the day on which our system of justice collapses completely."
"But what we are all searching for, of course, is clarity. I hope that what I have written can contribute to that."
"It’s been a bit like wandering through a desert."
"If humans were allowed to live too long, their knowledge would increase to such an extent that they would be able to see through the mandarins and join forces to exterminate them. A short life span prevents many revolutions."