Quotes from Alexander McCall Smith

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

Everybody in a village had a role to play in bringing up a child—and cherishing it—and in return that child would in due course feel responsible for everybody in that village. That is what makes life in society possible. We must love one another and help one another in our daily lives. That was the traditional African way and there was no substitute for it. None.

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

Inside every one of us, thought Mma Ramotswe, there is the child we once were, the child that was unsure about the world and our place in it.

It just did not make sense; unless, of course, as she had suggested, we all have a weak point, an area of intellectual or emotional vulnerability that may be quite out of keeping with out character.

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

So what is this love that comes with being married? ... Being fond of somebody? Being nice? Wanting them not to go away? ... the line struck me with its poetic force. I didn't want you to go away... It was certainly powerful, and perhaps it was as good a definition of love as any other.

I was staying in a house beside the machair. In front of this house was a stretch of lawn, and at the edge of the lawn there was a river. By the riverside, its door wide open, was a shed into which I wandered. Inside the shed was a large art nouveau typesetting machine. I was being called, and I turned away from my discovery of the typesetting machine to make my way back to the house and to our hostess. People in dreams do not always have names, but she did. She was called Mrs. MacGregor.

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

The trouble with technology is that it's dehumanised us – it's removed the restraints of ordinary human interactions. So we lose the notion that the person with whom we're dealing is a person like us, with failings and feelings. It's exactly the same as in wartime. When people are engaged in conflict, they very easily lose sight of the humanity of the other. They become capable of doing things that they would never do in their ordinary lives.

Hospitals were to her a memento mori in bricks and mortar; an awful reminder of the inevitable end that was coming to all of us but which she felt was best ignored while one got on with the business of life.

She would give him the benefit of the doubt, as she always did: her experience had taught her that the names we gave to others, and the things we accused them of, often said more about us than they did about them.

And the beautiful are forgiven; no matter how egregious their shortcomings, they are forgiven.

It's really rather easy to write eighth-century Chinese poetry, said Angus Lordie. In English, of course. It requires little effort, I find.

The realisation of our mortality came slowly, in dribs and drabs, until we bleakly acknowledged that everything was on loan to us for a short time—the world, our possessions, the people we knew and loved. But we could not spend our time dwelling on our mortality; we still had to behave as if the worst would not happen, for otherwise we would not do very much, we would be defeated and give up.

each of us needed to find just the right way to take our mind off our problems, and it did not matter what that was--a drive in the country, an expedition to a shoe shop, a quiet cup of tea under a cloudless sky; each of us had something that made it easier to continue in a world that sometimes, just sometimes, was not as we might wish it to be.

There are many people who are frightened of something or other, Mma, she said. Even here in Botswana there are people who are frightened. They had looked at each other without saying anything. Each knew what the other meant; each knew that there were things that people preferred not to acknowledge not to admit, lest the admission encourage that which needed no encouragement.

How many of us are happy to be exactly where we are at any moment?

We don't hate people, Puso. We don't hate anybody." He looked at her sullenly. "Why?" he asked. "Because hate makes you very tired," said Mma Ramotswe. She wondered whether there was more to say, but suddenly she felt tired herself.

Let's go back to the lines at the end of "In Praise of Limestone": "What I hear is the sound of underground streams / What I see is a limestone landscape." Close your eyes and try to imagine the shape of these lines. I see a falling, a descent, a softening, with the gentlest of landings at the end. And I feel resolution, calmness, and forgiveness.

He seemed genuinely astonished. You admire me? Yes, she said gravely. All of us do things we regret--that's part of being human. And sometimes, I think, moral quality reveals itself not so much in what we do, but in what we later say about what we have done....

Lists, she thought, are the stories of our lives; they give a picture of who we are and what we do every day. The

Antonia was very conscious of the corrosive power of envy and felt that it was this emotion, more than any other, which lay behind human unhappiness. People did not realise how widespread envy was.

It is such an easy thing to do—to touch another in sympathy—but it is such a hard thing too.