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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 0417489 | Although she entirely understood the argument in favour of openness, there were limits to the extent to which one should speak frankly. She did not agree with the custom that was sometimes followed in Africa of avoiding direct confrontation with those with whom one disagreed--that led to all sorts of failures, she knew--but one should still be careful to avoid hurting feelings by challenging others too openly. Often it was better to be gent.. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 24e9c99 | she knew that this man, this mechanic, this fixer of machines with their broken hearts, did indeed love and admire her--was like walking in the sunshine; | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 5134576 | There were times when life's problems were convincingly outweighed by its possibilities, and this, she felt, was one. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 4d24044 | wise men are remembered, they always are. | unconditional-love | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| 3d50a47 | of day it was or how we were feeling, they were | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 409fef4 | But then men do not see things the same way we do, she thought. They have different eyes. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| d4cee71 | All that I know is that he is sad in his heart...that is the place where his sadness is. Right there. And I do not think that is ever very easy to deal with sadness in that part of the body. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 8a4c2e7 | We should all have a tree in our childhood...a tree one might explore, a tree from which one might learn how to fall. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 26bf7cf | She moved, so that they were now standing arm in arm: two ladies, she thought, a brown lady from Botswana and a white lady from somewhere far away, America perhaps, somewhere like that, some place of neatly cut lawns and air conditioning and shining buildings, some place where people wanted to love others if only given the chance. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 655692c | Cake," said Mma Ramotswe quickly. "That is Mr J.L.B. Matekoni's great weakness. He cannot help himself when it comes to cake. He can be manipulated very easily if he has a plate of cake in his hand." | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| e092f3f | they are dazzled by all the money that they are being offered. That is what money does, Mma Ramotswe--you must have seen that. Sometime we need to look the other way when people put money in front of our noses. We have to look at the other things we can see so the money doesn't hide them. | money priorities values | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| 3b92297 | It's so difficult to sustain a fatwa,' said Domenica. 'One has to be so enthusiastic. I'm not sure if I could find the moral energy myself. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 330674b | There was no point in telling somebody not to cry, she had always thought; indeed there were times when you should do exactly the opposite, when you should urge people to cry, to start the healing that sometimes only tears can bring. But if there was a place for tears of relief, there might even be a place for tears of pride[.] | healing | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| 92aa9d9 | Everybody kissed one another these days; kisses meant nothing. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 5c24a6d | There are many words for push, take, shove, carry, load, and no words for love, or happiness, or the sounds which birds make in the morning. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| d230a07 | The problem was, of course, that people did not seem to understand the difference between right and wrong. They needed to be reminded of this, because if you left it to them to work out for themselves they would never bother. They would just find out what was best for them and they would call that the right thing. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 4e46639 | Regularity without some metaphysical value behind it, some beauty of soul or character, was more disappointing - and indeed repulsive - than the honestly haphazard, the humanly messy. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| c01c0e7 | nemo dat quod non habet. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 899d800 | Society may be post-Christian, but could hardly ignore its Judeo-Christian past; we did not, after all, come from nowhere. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 5a6762e | the fear of what might happen in the future is almost always worse than the future that eventually arrives. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| da93fc6 | high heels were always a temptation, but, like all temptations, one paid for them later... | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 95013f0 | He tilted his hat back slightly, so that he could see the sky more clearly. It was so empty, so dizzying in its height, so unconcerned by the man who was crossing a field beneath it, and thinking as he did so. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| cebd719 | But look at it now: a detective agency, right here in Gaborone, with me, the fat lady detective, sitting outside and thinking these thoughts about how what is one thing today becomes quite another thing tomorrow. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| fdca848 | and with it would come that wonderful, unmistakable smell of rain, that smell of dust and water meeting that lingered for a few seconds in the nostrils and then was gone, and would be missed, sometimes for months, before the next time that it caught you and made you stop and say to the person with you, any person: That is the smell of rain, there, right now. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 5fe7027 | I sometimes find myself thinking: wouldn't it be far less complicated to have a job like that? To sell things? To order cheese and salamis and all the rest and not worry about what we should do and how we should do it? | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| c9f6944 | But only if youses shift yoursels and get in." He used the demotic plural of you, a common feature of speech in Scotland." | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 654e455 | She was crying because she was far from home, and who among us has never wanted to do that? There need be no other reason; just that. We cry for home, and for flowers on tables, and biscuits in little tins, and for mother; and we feel embarrassed, and foolish too, that we should be crying for such things; but we should not feel that way because all of us, in a sense, have strayed from home, and wish to return. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| b92694a | So one might cry for everything that was wrong with the world, for all the injustice and crudity and cruelty, for all the things that are stolen from people. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 6a84860 | We should not be too surprised by the kindness of strangers, as it is always there. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 7017cd2 | Great art, she felt, had a calming effect on the viewer; it made one stop in awe, which is exactly what Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol did not do. You did not stop in awe. They stopped you in your tracks, perhaps, but that was not the same thing; awe was something quite different | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| dc253f7 | You know something?" he said to Jamie. "I've never believed in God, but I do believe in his love." | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 318e973 | She saw the picture of idle fishing boats tied up at Peterhead; further gloom for Scotland and for a way of life that had produced such a strong culture. Fishermen had composed their songs; but what culture would a generation of computer operators leave behind them? | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| b05376d | The physical world--the world of stone and brick--is indifferent to our suffering, to our dramas, she thought. Even a battlefield can be peaceful, can be a place for flowers to grow, for children to play; the memories, the sadness, are within us, not part of the world about us. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 53d755a | your mind like that, then you kept it in good order for a longer period of time, and you put off the day when you would be sitting in the sun, like some of the very old people, not exactly sure which day of the week it was and wondering why the world no longer made the sense that it once did. Yet such people were often happy, he reminded himself, possibly because it did not really matter what day of the week it was anyway. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| e323759 | It was pure privilege that determined where so many of us ended up in life, Isabel reflected; it was nothing to do with merit, it was privilege. Or, putting it another way, it was a matter of accident, or luck. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 05eff71 | Martha simply did not know that virtually everything she said was inappropriate, and so there was no point in remonstrating with her. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 5df9437 | You are innocent in your heart," she had said to him. "That is the most important thing." And he had thought about that for a few moments before shaking his head and saying, "I would like that to be true, Mma, but it is not. It is what other people think. That is the most important thing." | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 952ce19 | There was a jauntiness in the young woman's manner that appealed to Isabel. And then there was the accent, which was not Scottish, but from somewhere in Northern Ireland and not unlike Georgina Cameron's; the English that Shakespeare would have spoken, preserved by centuries of relative linguistic isolation. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| eb05fdf | All of us had hard choices, she thought; the greatest of us and the least of us, and we had to feel our way through them and accept that there would sometimes be regrets. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| a83410a | So plans were useful only in revealing what people wished for. If you wanted to know what they would actually do, then the only way of finding out was by watching them and seeing what they did. Then you would know what they might do in the future--because most people did what they had always done. That, | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 0b1f046 | You're not angry, Mma?" She shook her head. What was the point of anger? There were occasions when Mma Ramotswe, like all of us, could feel angry, but they were few--and they never lasted long. Anger, Obed Ramotswe had explained to her once, is no more than a salt that we rub into our wounds. She had never forgotten that--along with the things he said about cattle, and Botswana, and the behaviour of the rains." | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| f4c5f86 | As she spoke, Isabel found herself thinking of the power of words. A single word, a phrase, a sentence or two could have such extraordinary power; could end a world, break a heart or, as in this case, consign another to moral purdah. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| e162460 | Being loved and admired by a man like that - and she knew that this man, this mechanic, this fixer of machines with their broken hearts, did indeed love and admire her - was like walking in the sunshine; it gave the same feeling of warmth and pleasure to bask in the love of one who has promised it, publicly at a wedding ceremony, and who is constant in his promise that such love will be given for the rest of his days. What more could any wo.. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 6088288 | That would have been taken out of the Munrowe voice two or three generations ago through being educated at schools that modelled themselves on the English public-school system, even if they were in Scotland. | Alexander McCall Smith |