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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 45e87a8 | it made me think of everything I had done. It made me weigh up my life. And it made me want to tie things up, so that next time - and I hope there will not be a next time - the next time I faced death like that, I could think: | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 9c16aef | Be gentle...Many of the people who will come to see you are injured in spirit. They need to talk about things that have hurt them, or about things that they have done. Do not sit in judgement on them, but listen. Just listen. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 67a1888 | They were also shoes that would give the wearer confidence: a person could speak with authority in such shoes. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 60519e3 | DOING THE DONKEY WORK | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 7f9752a | 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 modernization, seemed to give a perfectly good set of guidelines for the conduct of one's life... | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 3b13308 | IF EITHER OF THEM had felt tetchy, the concert put them both in a good mood. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| a5f6ab5 | People who looked after animals were by and large kind people; they simply practised kindness, unlike those who made much of it. Thus, thought Isabel, are virtues best cultivated--in discretion and silence, away from the gaze of others, known only to those who act virtuously and to those who benefit from what is done. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 9e07ecd | old-fashioned, gentle Scottish physician, unmoved by the considerations of profit and personal gain that could so disfigure medicine. That doctors should consider themselves businessmen was, Isabel had always felt, a moral tragedy for medicine. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| a072ecc | A large bird, a buzzard perhaps, was circling on high on a current of air, a tiny, soaring point of black, looking for food, of course, as all of us did, in one way or another. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| dfa3229 | And yet, she suddenly wondered, should you actually lie about how much Proust you've read? | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 9440357 | But she realised that this was what anxiety was like--it knew no rhyme or reason; just as a fear of the dark cannot be assuaged by the pointing out that there was nothing there, anxiety could be without foundation. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 25927eb | It is I who will beat her if she tries anything. I am a traditionally built lady, you know, and if there are any bad people who try to push me around--or to beat me--then I can sit on them very quickly. And if I do that, then they cannot breathe--all the air goes out of their lungs and they cry out, 'I am not | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| d5159ac | she found herself looking down on the top of Teenie's head; at a small woollen bobble, in fact, which topped a curious tea-cosy style knitted cap which she was wearing. She looked more closely at it, wondering if she could make out an opening through which a tea pot spout might project; she could not see an opening, but there was a very similar tea cosy in the office, she remembered, and perhaps she or Mma Ramotswe might wear it on really c.. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 119fff1 | Saying sorry does not make you look small--it makes you look big." "I think so too," said Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. "But some people are small inside, and if you're small inside, you can't be big outside. It just won't come to you." | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 43af787 | If more women were in power, they wouldn't let wars break out," she said. "Women can't be bothered with all this fighting. We see war for what it is--a matter of broken bodies and crying mothers." -- | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| aeca933 | She had barely talked to Jamie about his school days, and she wondered whether this was another area of experience that was for some reason out of bounds. Had he been happy? Who had his school friends been? She had no idea. There must be a reason why he had decided not to attend his ten-year class reunion; normally Jamie's instincts were social. If invited to a party, he went, and usually enjoyed himself; perhaps this did not apply to reuni.. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 998cdbb | Many people only go to see other people when they want to ask for some favour. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| cb84770 | But God will surely punish her, Mma," then had decided that this was not the sort of thing that people said any more, even if it was what they were thinking. The trouble was, she thought, that God had so many people to punish these days that he might just not find the time to get round to dealing with Violet Sephotho. It was a disappointing thought--a lost opportunity, in a sense: she would very willingly have volunteered her services to as.. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 5218ee9 | Elysian | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 0e73bc7 | It is so easy to thank people," said Mma Ramotswe, passing the letter over to Mma Makutsi, "and most people don't bother to do it. They don't thank the person who does something for them. They just take it for granted." | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| f8b95d8 | Now, as he finished the last of his porridge, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni reminded himself that the one thing he felt certain about when it came to women was that you could never be sure. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 1747837 | Some knowledge is a fish," she muttered. "Some is a serpent." | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 9e1f9b1 | sometimes the people who were closest to you were also those who were furthest away. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 9d5bcba | If people came at you and started to scratch you, then of course you had the right to sit on them. Even Nelson Mandela, she told herself, who was a good and gentle man, would have agreed with that. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| e95af7d | love was a form of blindness that closed the eyes to the most glaring faults. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| f75848b | An Englishman was reflecting on the different words that people use for fish. 'Isn't it strange,' he said, 'that the French say le poisson, the Spanish say el pescado, and the English call it fish--which is what it is.' | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 612d8ab | and although she'd glibly remarked that you couldn't stand still, was this actually true or was it a hollow axiom as false and misleading as any other trite saying? Why should one not stand still? If the position in which one found oneself standing was a satisfactory and comfortable one? She felt no need, no need at all to move on from being Mma Ramotswe of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, wife that great mechanic, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| c8e3c0f | There may be no book on the mothers of poets, or artists in general, but it might one day be written and would be, I think, an enlightening read. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 15e20da | Ribsy had | Beverly Cleary | ||
| ee23c39 | Hello, honey," he said. "You are a very nice fat lady. I like a soft mattress." She drew in her breath. "Then go home and lie down on your bed," she said. "Go back to your wife. I know her, by the way." | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 6d33db7 | have misgivings about people not having a spiritual life. It's so ... so shallow. I sometimes think that life without a spiritual dimension must be like being made of cardboard--and as deep and satisfying." She paused. "I feel that 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." | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| b9a93d0 | Mma Ramotswe rose to her feet, allowing the woman beneath her to gasp for air and reinflate. She did not enjoy sitting on people, but every so often it was necessary, and in this case it was entirely justified by self-defence. If people came at you and started to scratch you, then of course you had the right to sit on them. Even Nelson Mandela, she told herself, who was a good and gentle man, would have agreed with that. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 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 |