Quotes from Alexander McCall Smith

We all had to say goodbye, sooner or later, to those we loved—or they had to say goodbye to us. Those were the only two possibilities that this world allowed. But no matter how much we tried to face up to it, it never became easier.

Stand on your toe. That is what one said in Setswana if one hoped that something would happen. It was the same as the expression which white people used: cross your fingers.

Love is nothing out of the ordinary, even if we think it is; even if we idealise it, celebrate it in poetry, sentimentalise it in coy valentines. Love happens to just about everyone; it is like measles or the diseases of childhood; it is as predictable as the losing of milk teeth, or the breaking of a boy's voice.

And here, she said to herself, is the victim of the witch hunt, or its modern equivalent. Not much has changed. Witchcraft or sexual harassment: the tactics of persecution were much the same - the loathed enemy was identified and then demonised.

And a coffee cup, as we all know, is not something that it pays to look into if one is searching for meaning beyond meaning; coffee, in all its forms, looks murky and gives little comfort to one who hopes to see something in it. Unlike tea, which allows one to glimpse something of what lies beneath the surface, usually more tea.

Such men knew their worth, but did not flaunt it. Such men could look anybody in the eye without flinching; even a poor man, a man with nothing, could stand upright in the presence of those who had wealth or power. People did not know, Mma Ramotswe felt, just how much we had in those days—those days when we seemed to have so little, we had so much. She

The sharing of a book is a statement—a message of affection that is also an act of self-revelation. Join my club, it says. Come and sit beside me.

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.

And Edinburgh. He was proud of Edinburgh too, and of Scotland; and why not? Why should one not be proud of one's country - for a change?

Yes, wisdom: that was something that came to everybody, although it came in varying quantities and at different times.

this was a consequence of increasing prosperity, which, curiously enough, just seemed to bring out greed and selfishness.

What is beauty, she thought, but the promise of happiness, as Stendhal said it was?

You have each other, thought Isabel.But was that enough? Even when one was in love, it was not really enough just to have the other person - not if one needed stimulation. The company of just one person could be reassuring, could stave off loneliness, but would it be enough for three months?

Hate is very easy to unleash, the Duke continued. All you need is the Other. And then people will take over from you and do all the hating that needs to be done, all the belittling, all the insulting and bullying.

And he thought for a moment how stupid our society had become, that its nanny-like concern for risk should prevent one man helping another to take a dead friend up the steps

You do not have to read a book to understand how the world works. You just have to keep your eyes open.

It was a good place to sit and listen, under a sky that had seen so much and heard so much that one more wicked deed would surely make no difference. Sins, thought Mma Ramotswe, are darker and more powerful when contemplated within confining walls. Out in the open, under such a sky as this, misdeeds were reduced to their natural proportions—small, mean things that could be faced quite openly, sorted, and folded away.

Mma Ramotswe tucked the cheque safely away in her bodice. Modern business methods were all very well, she thought, but when it came to the safeguarding of money there were some places which had yet to be bettered.

Some people cannot bear news like that. They think they must live forever, and they cry and wail when they realise that their time is coming. I do not feel that, and I did not weep at that news which the doctor gave me. The only thing that makes me sad is that I shall be leaving Africa when I die.

The trouble with this country...is that we are utterly surrounded by busybodies trying to stop us doing things. Or telling us what to do...Big Brother, with his ubiquitous closed-circuit cameras-which now monitored, it seemed, every square inch of public space-and his condescending imprecations and warnings, was everywhere...In his view, it was up to the individual whether or not to approach a cliff edge; it was not the Government's business.

For a short while she considered the idea of orchestral courtesy. Certainly one should avoid giving political offence: German orchestras, of course, used to be careful about playing Wagner abroad, at least in some countries, choosing instead German composers who were somewhat more ... apologetic.

How many of us dig our own graves, thought William. We dig them with vigour and determination, unaware of the implications, but with all the conviction of those who do not really know what they are doing, who are impervious to the dangers that others can see so clearly.

His life was unrecorded; who is there to write down the lives of ordinary people?

A dog sees no point in dwelling on things that have happened; the important thing is that they are not happening now. In that respect, they have something to teach us: we so often feel that then is now, and this leads us to prolong the suffering of yesterday into the suffering of today. Dogs do not do that.