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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 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 | ||
| 09e5332 | Let's not have a sniffle, let's have a jolly good cry And always remember, the longer you live, the sooner you jolly well die. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 1006369 | We should all busy ourselves in being who we are, | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| e003966 | Time, she felt, made quite enough claims on us, without our conniving in its relentless tyranny. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| f25ad95 | Perhaps there was no real point to our existence-or none that we could discern-and that meant that the real question that had to be asked was this: How can I make my life bearable? We are here whether we like it or not, and by and large we seem to have a need to continue. In that case, the real question to be addressed is: How are we going to make the experience of being here as fulfilling, as good as possible? That | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 5852c03 | She knew as well as anyone that the world could be a place of trial and sorrow, that there was injustice and suffering and heartlessness - there was enough of all that to fill the great Kalahari twice over, but what good did it do to ponder that and that alone? None, she thought. | sorrow suffering | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| b1b5cd1 | We are the ones who first ploughed the earth when Modise (God) made it," ran an old Setswana poem. "We were the ones who made the food. We are the ones who look after the men when they are little boys, when they are young men, and when they are old and about to die. We are always there. But we are just women, and nobody sees us." | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 3c3c375 | And they both had the land about them; the sky that went on forever, it seemed, and was filled with sun and with the air that they all needed, that the cattle needed, that the animals in the Kalahari needed--there was plenty of that; they had Botswana. So everybody had the things that mattered, when you came to think of it... | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 282f35e | She had muttered the words without realising, as unintentionally as she had said co-director. It was a worrying prospect: if one started to say what one was thinking, the results could be very embarrassing. She might think, Oh, there goes Mma Makutsi again--sounding off about the usual things, and were she to say that, the consequences would be awkward. There would be all sorts of misunderstandings ... or would they be misunderstandings at .. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| a46db4d | It was all a question of face, she decided: you had to leave room for face to be saved. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| c0f866c | Everything could always be worse,' she would say, 'and so be grateful that things are only as bad as they are.' She | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 5d8d9ac | Boys, men," she said. "They're all the same. They think that this thing is something special and they're all so proud of it. They do not know how ridiculous it is." | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 94a8f58 | That was the problem with human failings - they were often more visible to others than to those whom they afflicted. | Alexander McCall Smith |