A Quote by Henning Mankell

For me Oliver Twist is a political novel. It is a furious critique of the treatment of orphans and poor children who were forced to spend their early lives in ghastly institutions.

Henning Mankell

Quote Topics

Children Critique Early Forced Furious Ghastly Institutions Lives Me Novel Oliver Oliver Twist Orphans Political Poor Poor Children Spend Treatment Twist Were

Quote Author

Henning Mankell
Swedish - Writer
February 3, 1948 - October 5, 2015

For me 'Oliver Twist' is a political novel. It is a furious critique of the treatment of orphans and poor children who were forced to spend their early lives in ghastly institutions.

Henning Mankell

It is very seldom that any one is in prison for an ordinary crime unless early in life he entered a path that almost invariably led to the prison gate. Most of the inmates are the children of the poor. In many instances they are either orphans or half-orphans; their homes were the streets and byways of big cities, and their paths naturally and inevitably took them to their final fate.

Lyndon B. Johnson

I remember doing my first school play. We were doing 'Oliver Twist,' and I was cast as Oliver. It was the first time I ever felt brave and confident and truly happy about something.

Kaya Scodelario

There is a kind of virtue that lies not in extraordinary actions, not in saving poor orphans from burning buildings, but in steadfastly working for a world where orphans are not poor and buildings comply with decent fire codes.

Randy Cohen

I knew early on that I wanted to be a reporter, but I didn't know I was a political journalist until my first job in Boston, in the '70s, covering the public school committee at a time when busing was a huge issue. Children's lives were being directly affected by political decisions, and that's when I realized that everything is politics.

Gwen Ifill

Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes.

Will Durant

Late children are early orphans.

John Wilmot

It was 1981. I was working on a novel. And I put that novel aside one day after I read a newspaper article. The story said there were 19 women still on the pension payroll who were Confederate war widows. They were women who very early in their lives had married very old men.

Allan Gurganus

Political revolutions aim to change political institutions in ways that those institutions themselves prohibit. Their success therefore necessitates the partial relinquishment of one set of institutions in favor of another, and in the interim, society is not fully governed by institutions at all

Thomas Kuhn

Of course the COVID situation is ghastly and undesirable, but I cannot ignore the fact that this gave me a chance to spend what I think is the maximum time in my life with my husband and children.

Rituparna Sengupta

My first performance was as one of the orphans in 'Oliver!'

Brad Hall

I auditioned for a community theater-slash-professional production of Oliver Twist in Union City when I was 11 because my cousin wanted to be an actor and I was visiting her and it seemed like fun. I was Oliver. I hadn't had any training, I was just a cute kid. There was an agent in the audience.

Carlo Alban

When a man is forced into early retirement, he is often being 'given up for a younger man.' Being forced into early retirement can be to a man what being 'given up for a younger woman' is for a woman... Why do many men get more upset by retirement than women do from the empty nest when their children leave home? When females retire from children, they can try a career; when a man retires from a career, his children are gone.

Warren Farrell

I had the idea that there were two worlds. There was a real world as I called it, a world of wars and boxing clubs and children'shomes on back streets, and this real world was a world where orphans burned orphans.... I liked the other world in which almost everyone lived. The imaginary world.

Norman Mailer

In China, I witnessed forced abortions and forced sterilizations performed on women who were told that the children they were carrying were 'illegal'. I went with them when they were arrested and remained with them as they were subjected to mind-bending psychological torture. And I accompanied them as they went in tears to the local clinic to have their pregnancies aborted.