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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 6c6668f | Because sometimes in this life we're given things that we don't deserve - that we haven't done anything to merit, so to speak. We don't have to give those up if they come our way. And remember this: plenty of people are better off than you. Inequality is written into the way the world works, no matter how hard we try to correct it." Miss Hardy paused. "You may be fortunate in one respect and less fortunate in another. Nobody's guaranteed ha.. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 2cba1ec | Maybe not," mused Maggie. "If we eat pies, then we should never, not for one moment, look down on the making of them." "I don't," said William." | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 3257c82 | The forges of friendship, thought Angus, may be busy ones, but their dorrs are always open. | friendship | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| 17e72a3 | There are awkward moments from which one can retreat, and awkward moments from which there is no escape. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| dc82d50 | Von Igelfeld was not sure. He remembered reading that Hume believed that our minds vibrated in sympathy, and that this ability - to vibrate in unison with one another - was the origin of the ethical impulse. And Schopenhauer's moral theory was about feeling, was it not; so perhaps they were one and the same phenomenon. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| c0283c9 | they were two people thrown together on a journey, who found themselves sharing the same railway compartment and becoming resigned to each other's company. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 9c4666e | there is something there--some force, or truth, perhaps--to put it at its most general. I sense it, and I suppose I'd even go so far as to say that I yearn for it. I want it to be. Maybe that's God. But I find it difficult to accept any statement as to his identity. And as for claims to be the sole interpreter of that force--the sort of claim made by religions that tell you that they have the sole answer--well, what can one say about such a.. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 8712218 | When she had lived in Bobonong the houses seemed perfectly normal to her and the house in which her family lived had seemed quite comfortable. But looking at it with eyes that had seen Gaborone, and the large buildings there, their house had seemed mean and cramped. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 850a0d0 | None of us, she thought, wants the world we know to come to an end; we do not want familiar things to be taken from us. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 24eb815 | unconscionable-eating the food in a supermarket was simply theft, and could be distinguished from shoplifting only by virtue of the nature of the container used to remove the property. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 6fd7128 | This was loyalty of a sort which was rare in an age of self-indulgence. It was an old-fashioned virtue of the type which her philosophical colleagues extolled but could never themselves match. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 14db1f2 | He could not imagine being interested in that way in somebody like Mma Mateleke; how would one ever get to plant a kiss on such a person if she was always talking? It would be difficult to get one's lips into contact with a mouth that was always opening and shutting to form words; that would surely be very distracting for a man, he thought, and might even discourage him to the point of disinclination, if that was the right word. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 09b1ac4 | substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive into adult years. Those are the ones in which we are bound to one | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| e39149f | How do you calibrate pain?" asked Jamie. "By cutting out the background pain of the world," answered Isabel. "By cutting all that out, not registering it, and responding only to those painful things that we can do something about. Because otherwise ..." | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| bd8c03e | You can't deceive your own mother. That's the one person, the only one, to whom you will always be transparent. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 7dd9487 | 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 | ||
| 677cbc5 | if you had no language, then what form did your thoughts take--if you thought at all? Of course you thought--she had never had any difficulty with accepting that--but how limited would your thoughts be in the absence of any words to express them? | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 6e67fd5 | Self-doubt was a luxury, as, perhaps, was the examined life. And yet the examined life, as the adage had it, was the only life worth living. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 8493282 | Psychology, she thought; that is what they called it these days, but in her view it was something much older than that. It was woman's knowledge, that was what it was; knowledge of how men behaved and how they could be persuaded to do something if one approached the matter in the right way. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 8ce1cdc | She knew that for many people this was their greatest ambition: to have a partner and a child, to live the domestic life, but she had never thought it would be enough for her. Yet it was. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 59bad1b | It was a stark choice: shoes or food; beauty or sustenance; the sensible or the self-indulgent. "I'll take the shoes," she said firmly." -- | guilt shoes shopping | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| 367041c | You can only wear one pair of shoes at a time," she said. "Rich people are like the rest of us--two feet, ten toes. We are all the same that way." | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 4ae4931 | It's easy to be foolish... It's dead simple, really. All you have to be is human and to allow yourself to do the human things, like fall in love with somebody when you know that there's no point and when you know, too, that it's just going to make you unhappy. It's better to be stoic - to be one of those people who manage to keep themselves to themselves, who manage to avoid letting go and becoming entangled in something that they know from.. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 586f26a | And then there is the poet Kenneth Koch, who while travelling in Kenya came to a railroad crossing at which this sign was posted: One train may hide another. This was meant, of course, as a warning to drivers of the fact that the train you see may not be the only train to reckon with, but it also meant, as Koch points out in his poem, that there are many things in this life that conceal other things. One letter may mean another is on the wa.. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 922bca3 | wrong to think the less of another for what he or she was. There was no moral obligation to others, nor necessarily to enthuse over them, but we did have to recognize their equal worth. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| f11bce9 | Manfred's interventions, he thought, had all the characteristics of radio jamming, designed to stop anybody else talking. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| d3195c8 | Nobody enjoys being on display," said Isabel. But then she thought: Some do, and so she added, "Except actors. And narcissists." | narcissists | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| 06e2984 | It must be frustrating being a poet-or any sort of artist-and not being able to offend anyone any more. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| d7c9225 | They realized that belief of whatever sort-whether it was the faith in History and the State, as in the shattered halls of communism, or faith in a particular theology-at least made it possible to get through the day. And if one felt better in the belief that one's life made sense in these terms, then what was wrong with that? Was it weakness to allow oneself the pleasure of thinking that one in some way? And did this engagement not resul.. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 15004d7 | She wouldn't disapprove of people who gave up philosophy or literary theory to do ordinary things." "Maybe not," mused Maggie. "If we eat pies, then we should never, not for one moment, look down on the making of them." | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| b9a3d18 | Why should everybody embrace the herd instinct, which required one to regard one set of politicians as being always in the right while demonizing another set? | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| a426475 | He was one of those people, she thought, who just seemed to know a great deal. And he spoke so wisely, as if had thought for hours about everything he said. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 690d1b9 | it,' he said. 'People change their | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 6ef25b5 | Sir Seretse Khama, | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| b2746cf | was particularly hard for women now, when there were so many children left without | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| e6ee292 | IT WAS three days after the satisfactory resolution of the Patel case. Mma Ramotswe had put in her bill for two thousand pula, plus expenses, and had been paid by return of post. This astonished her. She could not believe that she would be paid such a sum without protest, and the readiness, and apparent cheerfulness with which Mr Patel had settled the bill induced pangs of guilt over the sheer size of the fee. It was curious how some people.. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| b088832 | Why, she asked herself, why keep a wound open when forgiveness can close it? | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 2a345ac | He knew that one should not punch people who annoyed one, although there was a case for it at times, a seemingly irresistible case. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 4138c63 | were in need of bodywork. It had always amused | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| cb056a1 | Teaching is so demanding, and you get so little support. That pinch will have done Olive no harm - probably a lot of good.' 'Do you really think so?' 'Yes,' said Matthew. But then he went on, rather sadly, 'But I suppose that's not the world we live in, with all these regulations and busybodies about.' He paused. 'I think you've struck a blow for sanity. Or rather, pinched one.' | u-s-education universal-education | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| d507912 | 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 drifting 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 s.. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| abe9834 | That's the way things are, don't you think? It's human nature. We do things for people we know. Everybody does that. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 561c83e | Look at the way people try to make points of contact with others when they meet. Look at the way you instinctively try to establish whether somebody you meet for the first time knows somebody you know. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 3c0a502 | It was reasonable enough, of course, for people to wish to speak to a man, if that is what they wanted, but that did not mean that a man would be better. | Alexander McCall Smith |