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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| aae4ebe | His particular insight was that we need to be at home; all his concerns with division within ourselves, with the tragic flaws in our nature, with the thwarting of love--all these point to the need that he felt we had within us to locate ourselves in a place we could live in with love, with people with whom we could share. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 41511fa | Mma Makutsi sighed. "You don't understand, Charlie. The word chairman covers both men and women." She paused. "Mind you, Mma Potokwane, many people these days just use the word chair. Perhaps you'd like--" She was not allowed to finish. "Certainly not, Mma," said Mma Potokwane. "I am not a chair--I am a person." | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 3623b35 | Anna asked, "Does that matter? What counts is the result, not the route by which one reaches the result. It's often all a matter of luck." Ulf pondered this. The role of luck in human affairs had always intrigued him. So much of what we did was influenced by factors that were beyond our control--the vagaries of others, sequences of events that we initiated in ignorance of where they would lead, chance meetings that led to the making of a de.. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| b0602d8 | The world was a place of sadness and strife, of selfish behaviour and disagreement, of oppression and injustice; and efforts to remedy that, to set right the scales of justice, sometimes seemed like patching up a crack in a dam wall with sticking plaster. But you had to do what you could, and, more specifically, what your role in life expected of you. And he was a detective; he was a member of the Malmo Criminal Investigation Authority, and.. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 84e590b | Dr. Svensson had once counselled him to think of the things you're doing rather than the things you did. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 770298b | Dogs can read signals -- look at sheepdogs; they understand hand movements for left and right. Dogs are no fools, you know." He paused. "Well, some are. Some dogs are truly stupid, Ulf." | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 777ea2c | The Germans had a word for everything - a word that could be very focused, very specific, because it could be constructed for a precise set of circumstances. They even had a word, it was said, for the feeling of envy experienced when one sees the tasty dishes ordered by others in a restaurant and it is too late to change one's own order. Mahlneid, meal envy, she believed that was the word - if it existed at all. People invented German compo.. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 286b078 | Most children have become very surly. That is because they are not taught to think about others any more. They are, quite simply, spoiled. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 7c22809 | As a general rule, making other people happy is one of the few things we can do with utter certainty that what we're doing is the right thing. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| bef6e68 | and was quite happy to let people get on with their jobs without his breathing down their necks. Privately, he and his family led a model life. He helped with Swedish-adjustment classes for refugees, while his wife, Anita, was an accountant who voluntarily did the accounts of two local charities. Their two clear-eyed sons had co-founded an aero-modelling club for disadvantaged youths. They were well liked in the suburb in which they lived, .. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| b6ef48e | The tree still celebrates its essential treeness through song, as nature will do whatever we impose on her. Birds still sing their ancient songs in the middle of a bustling city, with all its cacophony of man-made sounds. Dry leaves still rustle like dice even when growing against concrete or hewn stone. Out of a tiny crack in a pavement will crawl a perfectly formed insect, a creature of curves and protrusions amidst a linear world of man'.. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| bae134e | It was perfectly possible to portray scientific knowledge as socially determined - and therefore not true in any real sense - when one was safe on the ground in Paris; but would you ask the same question in a jet aircraft at thirty-five thousand feet, when that same knowledge underpinned the very engineering that was keeping one up in the air? | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 863a827 | am lucky that I can make somebody so happy just by saying something. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| e82e651 | you, I did once, years ago, do a little picture of Margaret Thatcher - bless her - a tiny little miniature. Then I pasted it onto a matchbox." Domenica looked puzzled. "Oh?" Angus smiled. "Yes. Then I stood the matchbox outside a mouse hole. The mouse had been bothering me - he had gnawed away at some canvas I had. So I used it as a mouse-scarer. It was more humane than a mouse-trap, you see. The mouse came out and saw this picture of Marga.. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| c9cc0d0 | Look at what very ordinary people have lost, and think about that for a moment. What has happened to working-class communities in Scotland? To miners, for example. To fishermen? Who? You might well ask. To men and women who work with their hands? Who again? These people are being swept away by globalisation. Swept away. Now they're all so demoralised that they're caught in the culture of permanent sick notes. And who speaks for the young Sc.. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 3cace88 | She really is a huge fan." Ulf closed his eyes. He saw the professor being pursued by a group of his fans, the huge ones struggling to keep up with the thinner, more lithe fans, dropping exhausted and disappointed." | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 65c9861 | But sometimes cats just have nasty natures, don't you think? And you can't do much about a personality disorder. Cats are psychopaths at heart. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| c9ecc3d | I can't, Tofu," said Bertie. "I can't join the cubs." Tofu was dismissive of Bertie's protestation. "You can't? Why? Is it because you think you'll fail the medical examination? There isn't one. That's the army you're thinking of. The cubs will take anyone - even somebody like you." | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| ac4fcfa | I like you when you're algebraic," said Ulf--and immediately regretted it. It was a flirtatious remark--describing somebody as algebraic was undoubtedly to cross a line. You would not normally describe an ordinary friend as algebraic, and then say that you liked her that way. He saw the effect on Anna, and his regret deepened. "Algebraic?" she said, half coyly. "Well, I'm very happy to enter into any equation." | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 30eba7a | In such a way is freedom of thought lost," said Angus Lordie, who had been listening very attentively to Domenica. "By small cuts. By small acts of disapproval. By a thousand discouragements of spirit." -- | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 57b7480 | We all have Proustian moments, but don't really know about it until we read Proust. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 9ab91bd | Eating with others was different from just talking to them--it was an act of commitment, a recognition of shared humanity. We all share these physical needs, it said; we are brothers and sisters in our vulnerability. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 7a863eb | As Adam Gopnik remarked in The New Yorker, "Post-modernist art is, above all, post-audience art." In" | David Bayles | ||
| 31309d7 | 67-If talking about the bureaucracy takes the place of talking about sports, getting involved with the bureaucracy takes the place of exercise. Every French man and woman is engaged in a constant entanglement with one ministry of another, and I have come to realize that these entanglements are what take the place of going to a gym where people actually work out. Three or four days a week you're given something to do that is time-consuming, .. | mental-failure exercise | Adam Gopnik | |
| cb85751 | The world was once haunted by Titus Oates's self-made epitaph: "I am going outside and may be some time. Well, we are going inside and may be some time, we are inside, and have been for awhile. The poetry of courage is replaced by the poetry of confinement, the art of the endless open channel overtaken by the art of the perpetually retold tale. Our successful withdrawal from the risks of winter makes for a lessening of its intensities. We h.. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| 37cc54b | There are at least three moments a month when you are ready to leap across a conter or a front seat to strangle someone: the woman at France Telecom who won't give you the fax ribbons that are there on the counter in front of her because she can't find them on the computer inventory ... the bus driver who won't let an exhausted pregnant woman out the front door of the bus (you're suppose to exit from the rear) from sheer bloody-mindedness. .. | status | Adam Gopnik | |
| 596c81a | Commentary by J.-P. Quelin, food critic for Le Monde). [New York and London chefs] are cooking, he says, at a level of originality that defies judgment, defies criticism, defies the grammar of cuisine. (This I think is true. When I took my brother to L'Arpege for his birthday we got fourteen -small- courses ... that made even the best of the old cuisine look like sludge.) /289 | criticism cuisine | Adam Gopnik | |
| a06e243 | Tenderness toward one's lost self is sentimental; tenderness toward one's lost longings is just life. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| e1be2aa | It was odd, he thought... to be in love with a girl at once so musical and so heavily armed. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| fb139d0 | we see life as deeply in our pleasures as in our pains. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| 1bbd0f8 | In Paris explanations come in a predictable sequence, no matter what is being explained. First comes the explanation in terms of the unique, romantic individual, then the explanation in terms of ideological absolutes, and then the explanation in terms of the futility of all explanation. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| 0d7ecee | A world in which everything is fashionable is impossible to imagine, because it implies that there would be nothing to provide a contrast. The reason that when you place any two things side by side, one becomes chic and the other does not is that it's in the nature of desire to choose, and to choose absolutely. That's the mythological lesson of the great choice among the beauties: They are all beautiful--they are goddesses--and yet a man mu.. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| 8b85998 | It is, I think, the journalist's vice to believe that all history can instantly be reduced to experience: ("Pierre, an out-of-work pipe fitter in the suburb of Boulougne, is typical of the new class of chomeurs . . .") just as it is the scholar's vice to believe that all experience can be reduced to history ("The new world capitalist order produced a new class of chomeurs, of whom Pierre, a pipe fitter, was a typical case . . .")." | Adam Gopnik | ||
| dee4758 | One economic problem is especially acute here: Unemployment ... Most of the other problems, the ones that create a sense of crisis, are anticipatory. They grow out of the fear that the right-wing government's tentative attempts at reform will eventually corral France into an 'Anglo-Saxon' economy, where an unleashed free market will make everybody do awful jobs for no money, forever. - 71 | work free-market | Adam Gopnik | |
| e4df77a | Parisians believe they are superior by birth, they do not believe, as Americans do, that they are invulnerable by right. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| 3446ce4 | The trouble with mental catch is that the ball you throw changes in midair into another. -109 | talk | Adam Gopnik | |
| b5f3301 | There is, I believe now, a force in stories, words in motion, that either drives them forward past things into feelings or doesn't. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| 7cc05b6 | The sublime moment of cooking, though, is really the moment when nature becomes culture, stuff becomes things. It is the moment when the red onions have been chopped and the bacon has been sliced into lardons and the chestnuts have been peeled, and they are all mijoteing together in the pot, and then--a specific moment--the colors begin to change, and the smells gather together just at the level of your nose. Everything begins to mottle, be.. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| 44ad782 | How could I forget you, Darryl? You called me God. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| 27abf51 | What made me sad just then was the new knowledge that things changed, and there was nothing you could do about it. In a way, that was a Parisian emotion too. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| cb5b8a8 | What was maddening was not the anti-Americanism, which is understandable and even, in its Asterix-style resistance to American domination, admirable. What is maddening is the bland certainty, the lack of vigilant curiosity, the incapacity for critical self-reflection, the readiness to afficher erreur distante and wait for somebody else to change the paper. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| 3e62008 | The real "crisis" in France in fact is not economic (France is in a cyclical slump; it will end) or even cultural (France is in a cyclical slump; it will end) but linguistic. French has diminished as an international language, and this will not end. When people talk about globalization, what they're really saying is that an English-speaking imperium now stretches from Adelaide to Vancouver, and that anyone who is at home in one bit of it is.. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| 9333421 | The passage from the big to the little is what makes Paris beautiful, and you have to be prepared to be small--to live, to trudge, to have your head down in melancholy and then lift it up, sideways--to get it. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| dbc5723 | There is a book to be written, for instance, on small errors in subtitles. In the Fred Astaire musical Royal Wedding, for instance, the English girl he falls for, played by Sarah Churchill (daughter of Sir Winston), is engaged to an American, whom we never see but who's called Hal--like Falstaff's prince, like a good high Englishman. That English H, though, was completely inaudible to the French translator who did the subtitles, and so thro.. | Adam Gopnik |