Alexander McCall Smith Quotes

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.

People stuck by others for years and years, in the face of all odds, and it should be relief, not disbelief, that one felt on witnessing it.

No plaque reminds the passer-by of these glories, although there should be one; for those who invent biscuits bring great pleasure to many.

What is one thing today becomes quite another thing tomorrow.

I'd like to be tidy, said Hen, I try, but I guess you can't be what you aren't.

A society that undermined its teachers and their authority only dug away at its own sure foundations.

The new lover, of a few weeks standing, may seem more precious than friends of decades.

Why, she asked herself, why keep a wound open when forgiveness can close it?

Simple questions
and simple answers
were what we needed in life. That was what Mma Ramotswe believed. Yes.

Talking about pumpkins doesn't make them grow.

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.

Well, that's the important thing, isn't it, Mma? To feel happiness, and then to remember it.

Self-pity does not appreciate pedantry.

that weddings are far more than marriage ceremonies; we know that they are occasions for family stock-taking and catharsis; that

He agreed with David Hockney that an artist really had to be able to draw before anything else could be achieved.

It is sometimes easier to be happy if you don't know everything.

It was all very well occupying the moral high ground on electoral reform, but what really mattered, she thought, was how you treated your mother.

The recipe for each child is just for that child, even if it is the same mother and father.

Painters aren't expected to paint bleak pictures, are they?

That, said Isabel, is the most painful feature of lost love. you wonder what the other person is doing. Right at this moment. What is he/she doing?

It was a voice that you felt you had to listen to - or you ignored at your peril.

A kind word, a word of encouragement or admiration, could shift the heaviest, most recalcitrant baggage.

Dogs are in on our human silliness; lions are not.

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.

Do not take on a traditionally built person unless you are prepared for a heavyweight bout.

International business, once allowed to stalk uncontrolled, killed the local, the small, the quirky.

Small things may be important to us; to be a sometime anything is sometimes something.

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.

If people have ghosts, then why shouldn't other things have them? What makes us so special that only we can have ghosts?

And yet, she suddenly wondered, should you actually lie about how much Proust you've read?

There were two classes of persons upon whom a duty of virtually absolute confidentiality rested: doctors and lovers.

You simply could not help everybody; but you could at least help those who came into your life.

Most people had something in their lives that was particularly important to them.

There are many more kind people than not-so-kind people, said Mma Ramotswe.

Words can make big things little, you know.

It was all a question of face, she decided: you had to leave room for face to be saved.

If you lose sight of the smaller accomplishments, you end up with an imbalance in your life.

We are very keen to disapprove.

There was a distinction between lying and telling half-truths, but it was a very narrow one.

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.

You do not have to ladle on the impasto to make a point about human frailty or ambitions.

Believe me, there's nothing more brittle than human beauty. Encounter it. Savour it, by all means. Then watch how it turns to dust.

most dogs seemed contented enough, and often seemed rather happier than the humans attached to them.

There is room in history for all of us.

People did not spend enough time sitting and talking, she thought, and it was important that sitting and talking time be preserved.

Distant wrongs, she thought: an interesting issue in moral philosophy. Do past wrongs seem less wrong to us simply because they are less vivid?

Insincerity had never come easily to her, but good manners required it on occasion, even if a superhuman effort was needed.

None of us is immune to shipwreck. Come, beckons the fatal shore: come and die on my white sands, it said. And we do.

Anger, Obed Ramotswe had explained to her once, is no more than a salt that we rub into our wounds.

I think that the measure of whether a life has been a good one is how much love there has been in that life
love both given and received.

But he'll never be fully recognised, because Scots literature these days is all about complaining and moaning and being injured in one's soul.

Everything, thought Mama Ramotswe, has been something before.

But we are all fortunate in one way or another. The task for most of us is to identify in what way that is, would you not agree?

Sir Seretse Khama,

That my philosophy of life is, as far as possible, one of enjoyment. I'm not nihilistic.

Do not be ashamed to cry, Rra," said Mma Ramotswe. "It is the way that things begin to get better. It is the first step.

It's through the small things that we develop our moral imagination, so that we can understand the sufferings of others.

I have three older sisters, so we were a reasonably large family and, in general, a happy one.

As a writer, you have to realize that people want to like the characters, so you have to be careful to keep them involved.

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.

Portraiture has its risks, and I suppose a dissident Free Presbyterian fatwa is one of them.

There are so many things we take in subconsciously and are unaware we ever saw. There is plenty of lumber like that in our minds.

That young man will go far, she said. I don't know in what direction, but he will go far.

There was no need for words, for there are times when words can only hint at what the heart would wish to say.

... people decided what they thought and would not be moved, not even by the most patient, the most rational argument.

This is a city of shifting light, of changing skies, of sudden vistas. A city so beautiful it breaks the heart again and again.

It was always disconcerting to meet those who had become so obsessed with a single topic that they could not see their concerns in context.

Was particularly hard for women now, when there were so many children left without

Violins sang, brass crowed, while bassoons, she felt, rumbled according to a Richter scale all of their own. Charlie

But who doesn't have a lot of unread books? It's nice, though, to know they are there.

None of us knows how we will cope with snakes until the moment arises, and then most of us find out that we do not do it very well.

The wider your readership, the greater the chances of offending your readers.

She's sociopathic. She will have no moral compunction in doing whatever is in her interests. It's as simple as that.

The size of one's house might bear a relationship to the size of one's opinion of oneself, but it had nothing to do with one's real worth.

A life without moments of unhappiness would be monotonous, I would have thought.

When you allow people to do what they wish, then that is what they do. They stop doing the things they need to do.

Special things have a way of surviving.

The night is a very bad time for questions to which there are no answers." Mr Badule looked at her. "You are very right, my sister. There is

Remember that, she said to herself; remember that in your dealings with others - they may be dying.

The telling of a story, like virtually everything in this life, was always made all the easier by a cup of tea.

A nudist? In Edinburgh? Does he realise what parallel we're on?

Oh I love gadgets and I pride myself on keeping at the cutting edge of technology.

There are so many ways of falling off the high moral ground you've carefully built up for yourself. Moral ground is like that - slippery at the edges.

You did not squeeze hands when you lied; it could not be done.

IF EITHER OF THEM had felt tetchy, the concert put them both in a good mood.

There are broad shoulders, the saying went, even where there are no broad shoulders.

The danger, of course, is that we spend time imagining that we would be happier elsewhere, and forget to cultivate happiness where fate has placed us.

Lions walk on four legs," observed Mma Makutsi. "Was this man walking on four legs? That can be a big giveaway, Mma.

But don't we often lie to people we love, or not tell them things, precisely because we love them?

Morality is for everyone and that is what

The fear of what might happen in the future is almost always worse than the future that eventually arrives.

were in need of bodywork. It had always amused

The sound of the kettle boiling was in itself the sound of normality, of reason, the sound of a fight back against the sadness of things.

Telling a person with toothache that there are others with greater toothache than their own was no help at all.

Tolerance was like one of those soothing creams - it drew out inflammation, it did away with the pain.

This tea is for people who really appreciate tea. Ordinary tea is for anyone.

You can't deceive your own mother. That's the one person, the only one, to whom you will always be transparent.

Sometimes the people who were closest to you were also those who were furthest away.

That was the trouble with people in general: they were surprisingly unrealistic in their expectations.

Perhaps this was a concomitant of freedom: if people were free, then some of them, at least, would be free of the constraints of good taste. Perhaps