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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| e72940e | So, in less elevated circles, we might toss a coin as to whether or not to go to a party, decide to go, and there meet the person whom we are to marry and spend our lives with. And if that person came, say, from New Zealand, and wanted to return, then we might find ourselves spending our life in Christchurch. Not that spending one's lifetime in Christchurch is anything less than very satisfactory--who among us would not be happy living in a.. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 101c22f | And he thought for a moment how stupid our society had become, that its nanny-like concern for risk should prevent one man helping another to take a dead friend up the steps | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| af5b16f | People were forever digging up events that had taken place a long time ago. And what was the point in doing this if the effect was merely to poison the present? There were many wrongs in the past, but did it help to keep bringing them up and giving them a fresh airing? | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 3c1303c | There are some people who should not be allowed on the road. Maybe they shouldn't even be allowed to walk anywhere, either. Maybe we should hang a large sign around their neck saying 'Very Dangerous', or 'No Sense', or something like that. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 2d7bb3c | Those important brain circuits, the ones that enabled most of us to avoid saying the wrong thing, were simply not there in Martha's case; or fired in the wrong order; or were short-circuiting. In other words, Martha Drummond was an electrical problem. And understanding people as electrical problems undoubtedly helped one to tolerate them. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 44bd3e5 | Africa was full of people in need of help and there had to be a limit. You simply could not help everybody; but you could at least help those who came into your life. That principle allowed you to deal with the suffering you saw. That was your suffering. Other people would have to deal with the suffering that they, in their turn, came across. | charity human-suffering | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| bb87852 | Music and art and philosophy are ultimately based on the premise that this man on his tractor, and these pigs, and the swarms of bees that fertilise the crops, will all continue to do what they do. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 6aeb0ec | She had been perfectly happy before she had met him; indeed she had been even slightly happier then. So the inscription might more accurately have read: "To remind you of how happy you've been in Edinburgh, in spite of the memories of me." But people never wrote that sort of brutally honest thing in books, largely because people very rarely have a clear idea of the effect that they have on other people, or can bring themselves to admit it. .. | inscriptions | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| 7d67257 | That was the trouble with people in general: they were surprisingly unrealistic in their expectations. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 3af7934 | Insincerity had never come easily to her, but good manners required it on occasion, even if a superhuman effort was needed. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 04dddce | This was the difficulty with laws and with legal language: they used language which very few people, apart from lawyers, understood. Penal Codes, then, were all very well, but she wondered whether it might not be simpler to rely on something like the Ten Commandments, which, with a bit of modernisation, seemed to give a perfectly good set of guidelines for the conduct of one's life, | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 4ad3815 | Angus thought about this. She was right. That was why our national conversation was so bad. Courtesy had been abandoned in favour of the put-down, the attack, the calculated sound bite. What sort of national conversation was that? The answer came to him immediately: none. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| abb44ea | That was the way the world was; it was composed of a few almost perfect people (ourselves); then there were a good many people who generally did their best but were not all that perfect (our friends and colleagues); and finally, there were a few rather nasty ones (our enemies and opponents). | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 5f20344 | Neighbours are given to us on the same basis as we are given our families. There is no element of choice involved - none at all. | neighbors | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| de0cbac | It was always disconcerting to meet those who had become so obsessed with a single topic that they could not see their concerns in context. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 68e44bd | William's weekend with his friends, Geoffrey and Maggie, was turning out to be neither restful nor enjoyable. Things could have been worse, of course: there must be weekends during which the hosts' house burns to the ground, one of the guests murders another, the hostess is arrested in extradition proceedings or the guests are all poisoned by the inclusion of death's cap mushrooms in the stew. Such weekends must be very difficult indeed, no.. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 6835315 | She had a great respect for books herself, and she wished that she had read more. One could never read enough. Never. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 363f561 | And Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni was at that moment on the verge of an exceptionally important thought, even though its final shape had yet to reveal itself. How much easier it was for Mma Ramotswe--she put things so well, so succinctly, so profoundly, and appeared to do this with such little effort. It was very different if one was a mechanic, and therefore not used to telling people--in the nicest possible way, of course--how to run their lives. T.. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| ca2f37a | Although she was not a great reader, Mma Potokwane was a firm believer in the power of the book. The more books that Botswana had, in her view, the better. It would be on books that the future would be based; books and the people who knew how to use them. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 69ae4a9 | And here, she said to herself, is the victim of the witch hunt, or its modern equivalent. Not much has changed. Witchcraft or sexual harassment: the tactics of persecution were much the same - the loathed enemy was identified and then demonised. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| ad04d98 | You can hear the train in those lines; you can feel its rocking motion. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| bded46d | How many of us dig our own graves, thought William. We dig them with vigour and determination, unaware of the implications, but with all the conviction of those who do not really know what they are doing, who are impervious to the dangers that others can see so clearly. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 8df2e16 | A dog sees no point in dwelling on things that have happened; the important thing is that they are not happening now. In that respect, they have something to teach us: we so often feel that then is now, and this leads us to prolong the suffering of yesterday into the suffering of today. Dogs do not do that. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 9ccfc66 | Everybody was a potential assailant; nobody spoke to one another for fear of being misinterpreted; nobody comforted another, put an arm around a shoulder-to do so would be to invite accusation. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 85d44c0 | Has he not got a wife back wherever he comes from? Is there no wife to say, 'You must not go off and visit library ladies'? | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| e4deb4e | How often have I noticed or, indeed, listened to him? We talk, but do I actually listen, or is our conversation mainly a question of my waiting for him to stop and for it to be my turn to say something? For how many of us is that what conversation means - the setting up of our lines? | listening | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| a2ed4a6 | She imagined what it must be like to have Charlie's mind - to believe that red shoes are faster then other shoes; to believe, as he did, that ducks could drive fire engines and that pigs built houses out of bricks and straw. There were plenty of people who weren't three-and-three-quarters who believed equally implausible things...and when to war over them. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 0143c91 | People caused harm to others because they were of malevolent disposition, that was shear human wickedness. something that has always existed and always would.Some people it seemed derived pleasure from inflicting suffering on others... | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| c729207 | You did not squeeze hands when you lied; it could not be done. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 0be87f1 | In fact, none of us knows how he ever managed to get his LLB in the first place. Maybe they're putting law degrees in cornflakes boxes these days. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 2b6a3f9 | Already many of the memories of the previous two weeks had faded: the smell of that small hotel in St. Andrews; that mixture of bacon cooking for breakfast and the lavender-scented soap in the bathroom; the air from the sea drifing across the golf course; the aroma of coffee in the coffee bar in South Street. She should have noted them down. She should have said something about all that and the light and the hills with sheep on them like sm.. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| bea69e2 | She did not think that those who were late, or the ancestors themselves, would wish punishment upon us, no matter what our transgressions. It was far more likely that there would be love, falling like rain from above, changing the hearts of the wicked; transforming them | forgiveness love | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| 956956d | She had always worked as hard as she could, at everything she did, and she simply did not understand how anybody could do otherwise. How could they sit there, as they did, and stare into the space in front of their desks when they could be adding up figures or checking the drivers' returns? | work-hard | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| 980c0ee | The trouble with the world today, she thought, was that people were not prepared to stand up to bad behaviour. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 1ccb671 | Our heads may be small, but they are as full of memories as the sky may sometimes be full of swarming bees, thousands and thousands of memories, of smells, of places, of little things that happened to us and which come back, unexpectedly, to remind us who we are. And who am I? | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 01fd073 | She was, in fact, often wrong--and knew it. Life became difficult when those who were often wrong did know it. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| febefaa | It was all very well being a modern society, but the advent of prosperity and the growth of the towns was a poisoned cup from which one should drink with the greatest caution. One might have all the things which the modern world offered, but what was the use of these if they destroyed all that which gave you strength and courage and pride in yourself and your country? | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| a291506 | For a moment, Isabel's eyes met those of someone looking out of the window, a thin-faced woman with her hair done up in a bun. The woman began a smile, but stopped, as if conscious of somehow transgressing the conventions of isolation with which as city-dwellers we immure ourselves. The bus moved on, and zisabel felt a sudden desire to run alongside it, to wave to the woman, to aknowledge the unexpected exchange of fellow feeling between th.. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 391b897 | Isabel is looking at several collections of research journals. 'She would understand the issues if she chose to open one of the volumes, but she knew that there were conversations within which she would never have the time to participate in. And that, of course, was the problem with any large collection of books, whether in a library or a bookshop: one might feel intimidated by the fact that there was simply too many to read and not know wh.. | library | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| a426090 | The readers of Isabel's journal were affected by the conversations within its covers-if nothing else, the livingroom of their moral imagination became bigger. And this must surely have some bearing on the way they dealt with the world, even in the small transactions of life: awareness of the pain of others here, a word of comfort there. Of course, the admission of kindness to one's life did not spring from any contimplation of the views of .. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 6c6554d | Metaphors were so bloody: people shot messengers,, flogged dead horses, cut the throats of their competitors. Perhaps that was life; perhaps that's what it was really like. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 83eaea1 | How could a very thin woman do all the things that women needed to do: to carry children on their backs, to pound maize into flour out at the lands or the cattle post, to cart around the things of the household--the pots and pans and buckets of water? And how could a thin woman comfort a man? It would be very awkward for a man to share his bed with a person who was all angles and bone, whereas a traditionally built lady would be like an ext.. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 2176e42 | Look at every territorial dispute you care to mention. Northern Ireland, for instance." "Religion in that case," Jamie ventured. "Not just. Religion was the badge of identity, but it wasn't really about whether you went to Mass or to a tub-thumping Protestant chapel. It was a result of the movement of people. The Protestant planters--many of them Scots--replaced the native Irish, remember? Movement of people again." | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 39e4ebf | what is one thing today becomes quite another thing tomorrow. | Alexander McCall Smith |