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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 43494ea | And she began to weep, dropping her head onto her forearms and rocking backwards and forwards in that curious motion that is perhaps a subconscious attempt to mimic the movement that brings comfort to a tiny baby. That we should in moments of sorrow seek to return to a time when the harshness of the world could be forfended by the simple reassurances of our parents; that we should do that ... | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 8d68a98 | But who doesn't have a lot of unread books? It's nice, though, to know they are there. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 997b790 | but to the north there was a bank of cirro-cumulus, a mackerel sky, or Schaefchenwolken--"sheep cloud"--as she remembered her father calling it. For some reason he had used German when talking about clouds and sea conditions; an odd habit that she had accepted as just being one of the things he did. "The weather," he had once said to her, smiling, "is German. I don't know why; it just is. Sorry." | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 08589b9 | But who doesn't have a lot of unread books? It's nice, though, just to know that they're there. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 8b815f0 | microbial resistance to antibiotics... | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| b2f3136 | cliched in their repetition and their superficiality, but part of an identity that saved us from feeling utterly lonely and detached, mere passengers on a circular rock spinning through space. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| efc51fb | It was a voice that you felt you had to listen to--or you ignored at your peril. | alexander-mccall-smith peril voice voices | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| 7a9f519 | Men, she thought, were odd about their clothes: they liked to wear the same things until they became defeated and threadbare. | clothes men | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| 8d93dca | There is a tidal wave of ignorance, Mma Ramotswe. It is a great tidal wave and it will drown all of us if we are not careful. | drowning ignorance ignorance-quotes tidal-wave | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| c0cf322 | and took us to the end of long, dark tunnels, which were filled with green rock and dust. My job was to load rock after it had been blasted, and I did this for seven hours a day. I grew | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| f87615d | Putting Mr. Polopetsi in charge of the investigation is like putting a rabbit in charge of the airport. | alexander-mccall-smith polopetsi rabbits | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| 2fd76a6 | I watched him walk down the path from the house and then off on to the dusty road. People do that in India. When they reach a certain time of life, they sometimes just walk off and become holy men and never come back.That is what my father did | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| dcd40bd | nothing. | Beverly Cleary | ||
| 7bab79b | She was proud of her build, which was in accordance with the old Botswana ideas of beauty, and she would not pander to the modern idea of slenderness. That was an importation from elsewhere, and it was simply wrong. How could a very thin woman do all the things that women needed to do: to carry children on their backs, to pound maize into flour out at the lands or the cattle post, to cart around the things of the household--the pots and pan.. | beauty fat slender thin-people traditional-beauty traditionally-built womans-beauty womans-body | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| a529427 | If a person acts out of character, then there's one thing you can be sure of: there is something wrong. I have seen this so many times I have lost count. | something-wrong | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| 9f5b192 | Why not imagine a talk with a pumpkin? Why not imagine going off for a drive with a friendly pumpkin, a companion who would not, after all, answer back; who would agree with everything you said, and would at the end of the day appear on your plate as a final gesture of friendship? | imaginary-conversations pumpkin pumpkins | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| cf0b300 | photographs on a wall were there for people to see and to examine if interested; an album is a different thing... | photo-albums photographs snooping | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| 193eebc | There are broad shoulders, the saying went, even where there are no broad shoulders. | broad-shoulders | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| 1477d5d | go badly wrong. Sex, she thought. That is what is going to go wrong here. And she was right. "This woman," Mma Gabane Gabane went on, "this foolish, foolish woman met a young man who worked in the same office. He wasn't an accountant--nothing like that--he was a trainee, Mma Ramotswe, just a trainee. He was eighteen." There was a sharp intake of breath from Mma Phumele, who looked at Mma Ramotswe to gauge her reaction. She would be every bi.. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 7fea5fd | We all have people in our lives we don't really choose as friends but with whom we're, well, lumbered, I suppose. Heart-sink friends. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 07edde2 | Penury was a matter of hard chairs and mean cushions; prosperity--old money--was a matter of feathers: an absurd reductionist view of it, but at times quite strikingly true. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 73374fd | all the good things that we have in life are on temporary loan, at best, and can be taken away from us in an instant. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 005737f | In her experience, the places one set off for were usually still there no matter when one arrived; it would be different, naturally enough, if towns, villages, houses moved--then one might have a real reason to hurry--but they did not. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 5677f8a | What we have, we all must lose--that applied to everything, even to that which we thought we had the greatest right. We were tenants of this earth--nothing more. | earth possessions | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| 5a4f1ce | Class reunions were about curiosity; about satisfaction at the avoidance of the mistakes of one's contemporaries, now revealed in their emerging life histories; about reflecting on the ravages--and injustices--of time; and of realizing, perhaps, how strange and random are the twists and turns of fate. | class-reunion reflection-on-life | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| 223e098 | Unless we do something about the past, she thought, then it will weigh us down to such an extent that we simply cannot move. Is that what I want? | the-past | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| 687684b | The juvenile adage Never kiss and tell had a sound moral instinct behind it. | alexander-mccall-smith kiss-and-tell | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| bcfff1e | people decided what they thought and would not be moved, not even by the most patient, the most rational argument. | convictions opinions | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| b163f96 | Tolerance was like one of those soothing creams--it drew out inflammation, it did away with the pain. | healing-the-emotional-self tolerance | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| 31d391f | the world was a vale of tears--it always had been. | vale-of-tears world | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| 9a6cd52 | there is faith and faith. One form of faith is actual practice--the rituals and so on--the other form of faith involves actually believing in it. | believing-in-faith faith faith-quotes practicing-faith | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| 009d0e7 | The reunion, she decided, was an unnecessary and stressful complication to life. We did not need to reheat cold dishes from the past. | class-reunion letting-to the-past | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| 36f91b8 | reunions, she felt, were not much more than a scratching at the vague itch of memory. And like scratching, they rarely helped--indeed, scratching often made matters worse, as any dermatologist would tell you. | class-reunion scratching | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| 028bebc | The turtles and birds who lived on the islands were also very friendly, as they hardly ever saw any humans and were always pleased to have some company. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| b01f9aa | And if you do see any pirates, I don't want you to pick up any rough manners from them. Do you understand? | teaching | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| 3b19924 | Bill and Ed did not look as bad as the other two, but they both had six or seven large gold rings in each ear, and this made them rattle when they walked. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| e777589 | They'll go to jail' said the Captain. 'And they'll stay there until Christmas. Then, if they promise to give up piracy and take an honest job somewhere, they may be allowed to go free. | second-chances | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| d1dcafc | It was a job that suited Stinger perfectly, as he was always happy when snarling, and snarling at sharks is as snarly a job as anyone can imagine. Of course it was possible that one day he might meet a shark who wasn't frightened of him, but then that's another story, and no job can be perfect in all respects. | love-your-job | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| 2f44555 | Yes," she agreed, "there are times when I am unhappy and times when I am happy. There are more happy times than unhappy ones, I think." | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 56fc5fb | And if things go on as they are, in a few months the men will have cut all the trees down and that will be the end of the bubblegum tree - forever'. Nobody said anything. Billy thought that he had never heard such a sad story before. Surely somebody could do something before the bubblegum trees before it was too late. | trees-matter | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| 4038f98 | for most of us there was a central, unavoidable problem-- the world was populated by people who were unlike us . That explained so many wars-- particularly religious ones; that explained persecutions and injustices; that explained simple everyday irritation with one's fellow man: They were just not like us. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| e606a8e | did it make a difference if the remark never got back to the person about whom it was made? She thought not. The harm is done when the words are uttered: that is the act of belittlement, the act of diminishing the other, and it is that act which would cause pain to the victim. You said that about me? The wrong was located in the making of the cruel remark, rather than in the pain it might later cause. | belittlement cruel-words cruelty words-that-wound | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| a3f7d5c | one of those dreadful boarding schools. It was down on the South Coast. I think some very unpleasant things happened there.... So many lives were distorted by such cruelty. I know so many men who had to put up with that, so many.... | boarding-school boarding-schools cruelty | Alexander McCall Smith | |
| 9e9a1cc | one of the coasts of a country that was a lifeboat, and that lifeboat was under siege by people who wanted to be taken on board. She thought to the southern shores of Italy and the boats that came up from the south, crammed with the desperate of North Africa striving to get into Europe. The vessels capsized under their human cargo; there were people in the water, their dream coming to a watery end. How could one turn one's face against all .. | europe lifeboat lifeboats refugee refugees | Alexander McCall Smith |