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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| d9d8543 | It's really rather easy to write eighth-century Chinese poetry," said Angus Lordie. "In English, of course. It requires little effort, I find." | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 7ed8fc4 | To dispatch one's friends to a dictionary from time to time is one of the more sophisticated pleasures of life, but it is one that must be indulged in sparingly: to do it too often may result in accusations of having swallowed one's own dictionary, which is not a compliment, whichever way one looks at it. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 075502a | I worry about you a great deal, Mma. I worry that you will take all the cares of the world on your shoulders and that you will collapse under the weight. I worry that you will open your heart to so many people that eventually it will be full--crowded--and it will stop because there is no room for the blood to go round. I am worried that you will look after so many people that you will forget that there is one person who also needs looking a.. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 5821fe5 | It is the onion, memory, that makes me cry," he said." | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 08ead6f | You know the best example of sincerity? The absolute gold standard? Who? Angus pointed to the door, outside which Cyril was waiting patiently. A dog. Have you ever met an insincere dog - a dog who hides his true feelings? Domenica looked thoughtful. And cats? Dreadfully insincere, said Angus. Psychopaths- every one of them. Show me a cat, Domenica, and I'll show you a psychopath. Textbook examples. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 6604146 | those who have a great deal to complain about are so often silent in their suffering, while those who have little to be dissatisfied with are frequently highly vocal about it. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 26d650b | There is a difference between a challenge and a burden. One is something you can carry on your shoulders easily enough--the other is something, a big sack, that bends you double. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 5bed309 | If people came at you and started to scratch you, then of course you had the right to sit on them. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 6e7e899 | The trouble with the world today, she thought, was that people were not prepared to stand up to bad behaviour. They looked away, | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 7b0cf27 | I shall go and sit under a tree.... Which tree, Mma?... Oh, there are many trees in this life, she said. It does not matter which tree you choose, as long as you choose the right one. | sitting trees | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| 34e914b | People who do that sort of thing may reap what they sow, but they also destroy the harvest of those who are around them. | destroy harvest reap-what-you-sow | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| 0f3162c | If you did not keep your yard in reasonable order, then your whole life would be similarly untidy. A messy yard told Mma Ramotswe everything she needed to know about its owner. | messiness order untidiness yards | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| e9e3ab7 | When there is nothing you can do to stop the march of adverse events, then the best thing, she felt, was to get on with life and not to worry. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 4bd0201 | He said: What is patriotism but love of the food one ate as a child? | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| b14f459 | The size of one's house might bear a relationship to the size of one's opinion of oneself, but it had nothing to do with one's real worth. | houses self-importance size | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| f8194b2 | Believe me, there's nothing more brittle than human beauty. Encounter it. Savour it, by all means. Then watch how it turns to dust. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 2009da7 | The problem, he thought, was that so much humour involved misfortune of one sort or another, and now that same human misfortune was out of bounds - interdicted by self-appointed guardians of sensitivity. There was somebody to be offended by everything, he though, which left little room for laughter. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 9dc2aeb | We've all had that sort of experience," said Mma Ramotswe. "Every one of us, Mma. We've all had a first day at school, or a first day in a new job. We've all been unsure what to do." | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| b3712d4 | Nobody is so bad that there is no chance of change. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 8a3ff13 | She would give him the benefit of the doubt, as she always did: her experience had taught her that the names we gave to others, and the things we accused them of, often said more about us than they did about them. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| ed4c511 | Let's go back to the lines at the end of "In Praise of Limestone": "What I hear is the sound of underground streams / What I see is a limestone landscape." Close your eyes and try to imagine the shape of these lines. I see a falling, a descent, a softening, with the gentlest of landings at the end. And I feel resolution, calmness, and forgiveness." -- | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 99a4d02 | But although the rules are vague And widely disregarded now Some precepts remain: live with love - That is a rule we all can understand; Forgive those who need forgiveness, Which I think is everybody, more or less; Be kind - that, perhaps, is first and foremost In any postmodern, new-fangled Code we devise for ourselves; Yes, be kind: love one another, And most of all tend with gentleness The small patch of terra firma That is allocated t.. | angus-lordie-s-poems how-to-live love | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| 5347f36 | I am glad you are pleased," said Mma Ramotswe. "You have broken the glass ceiling that stops secretaries from reaching their full potential." Mma Makutsi looked up, as if to search for the ceiling that she had broken. There were only the familiar ceiling boards, fly-tracked and buckling from the heat. But the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel itself could not at that moment have been more glorious in her eyes, more filled with hope and joy." | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| c5e2321 | Africa had a way of coming back and simply covering everything up again. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| de7ef3e | All our human endeavours are like that, she reflected, and it is only because we are too ignorant to realize it, or are too forgetful to remember it, that we have the confidence to build something that is meant to last. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 424bd60 | Everything, it seemed to Mma Ramotswe, had a waiting list--except the government taxman and the call, when it came, to leave this world. You could not argue with the agents of either of these: you paid, and you went. But I am just on the waiting list...No, there is no waiting list for these things... | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 780e239 | But remember, that for every cheating wife in Botswana, there are five hundred and fifty cheating husbands." Mma Makutsi whistled. "That is an amazing figure," she said. "Where did you read that?" "Nowhere," chuckled Mma Ramotswe. "I made it up. But that doesn't stop it from being true." | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 95204e7 | as she made her way back to the tiny white van she listened to her own breathing and felt her own heart thumping wildly. She had no idea where she had found the courage, but it had been there, like the water at the bottom of a disused quarry--unfathomably deep. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 2bb54e5 | You must not think that because one thing happens after another thing, then it is the first thing that causes the second thing. You must not think that, because it might not be true. | cause-and-effect cause-and-effect-quote cause-and-effect-quotes | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| 53d634b | I was staying in a house beside the machair. In front of this house was a stretch of lawn, and at the edge of the lawn there was a river. By the riverside, its door wide open, was a shed into which I wandered. Inside the shed was a large art nouveau typesetting machine. I was being called, and I turned away from my discovery of the typesetting machine to make my way back to the house and to our hostess. People in dreams do not always have n.. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 6ed7bcd | In bed that night, in the darkness, with the illuminated dial of her alarm clock glowing from the bedside table, she asked herself whether one could force oneself to like somebody, or whether one could merely create the conditions for affection to come into existence and hope that it did, spontaneously. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 35ab1dc | You have to tell her that you have forgiven what she did to you. You have that duty because we all of us have it. It comes in different forms, but it is always the same duty. We have to forgive. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 450a14f | We don't know that we've lost half a minute from our lives but we feel it somehow, we feel its absence. Something is missing, we think. And so we long for the thing we've missed and can't name, and out of that wanting - well, everything else rises, good and bad. What do you think leads us to the windows in the first place? The light in your eyes shines because of the longing in your soul. And the longing in your souls rises because you are .. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| 3a8ecc3 | A beam of pink light blinded him; he felt dreadful pain in his head, and clapped his hands to his eyes. I am blind! he realized. With the pain and the pink light came understanding, an acute knowledge; he knew that Zina was not a human woman, and he knew, further, that the boy Manny was not a human boy. This was not a real world he was in; he understood that because the beam of pink light had told him that. This world is a simulation, and s.. | Philip K. Dick | ||
| a5a8cf6 | And yet he felt repelled by the teaching machines. For the entire Public School was geared to a task which went contrary to his grain: the school was there not to inform or educate, but to mold, and along severely limited lines. It was the link to their inherited culture, and it peddled that culture, in its entirety, to the young. It bent its pupils to it; perpetuation of the culture was the goal, and any special quirks in the children whic.. | Philip K. Dick | ||
| 8f68d27 | It was a battle, Jack realized, between the composite psyche of the school and the individual psyches of the children, and the former held all the key cards. A child who did not properly respond was assumed to be autistic-that is, oriented according to a subjective factor that took precedence over his sense of objective reality. And that child wound up by being expelled from the school; he went, after that, to another sort of school entirel.. | Philip K. Dick | ||
| abf2b2a | She was a redhead and he liked redheads; they were either outrageously ugly or almost supernaturally attractive. | Philip K. Dick | ||
| 577c02d | Bob, you know something . . ." Luckman said at last. "I used to be the same age as everyone else." "I think so was I," Arctor said. "I don't know what did it." "Sure, Luckman," Arctor said, "you know what did it to all of us." "Well, let's not talk about it." He continued inhaling noisily, his long face sallow in the dim midday light." | Philip K. Dick | ||
| 0bbe20d | It horrified him, this thought: the ancient gigantic cannibal near-man flourishing now, ruling the world once more. We spent a million years escaping him, Frink thought, and now he's back. And not merely as the adversary . . . but as the master. | Philip K. Dick | ||
| 2ec1687 | Amazing, the power of fiction, even cheap popular fiction, to evoke. | Philip K. Dick | ||
| 471b238 | The rule of survival, he thought. Keep eye peeled regarding situation around you. Learn its demands. And- meet them. Be there at the right time doing the right thing. | Philip K. Dick | ||
| cd64b29 | It is impossible that ours is the only world; there must be world after world unseen by us, in some region or dimension that we simply do not perceive. | Philip K. Dick | ||
| 33dc9a4 | Eric, I'm going to pay you back for leaving me." She smoothed her dress. "You understand?" "Yes," he said, and walked into the kitchen. "I'll devote my life to it," Kathy said, from the bedroom. "Now I have a reason for living. It's wonderful to have a purpose at last; it's thrilling. After all these pointless ugly years with you. God, it's like being born all over again." "Lots of luck," he said." | Philip K. Dick | ||
| f7367df | Oh no," she said, still smiling; her eyes poured over with light, that of compassion. She understood how he felt, that this was not an impulse only. But the answer was still no, and, he knew, it would always" | Philip K. Dick |