Quotes from Alexander McCall Smith

And that somehow made it easier for both of them; and so she had decided that even if there were no angels, we might still wish to believe in them because that made our life more bearable, and she was not ashamed to think like that.

If you don't have things to keep you busy, you end up starting fights with your neighbours.

looked at Jock Dundas, who was

You know what they're like. Mma Ramotswe nodded. She did. They were not all bad, of course. But many of them were awful, which somehow eclipsed the better qualities of some of the nice ones. It was very sad.

am lucky that I can make somebody so happy just by saying 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.

We were all just people who chose to call ourselves by curious things known as names, and the only significant difference between any of us lay in what we did with our lives.

Men, she thought, were odd about their clothes: they liked to wear the same things until they became defeated and threadbare.

Von Igelfeld wondered whether there was a moral obligation to read a letter. Surely the moral principles involved were the same as those which applied when somebody addressed a remark to one. One does not have to answer; but inevitably does.

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.

What they would see first would be a darkening of the sky in the east—a change from empty blue to a grey-white that would gradually shade into a heavy, inky purple. And then there would be a wind—the wind that preceded a storm and carried the smell of rain on its breath.

course she wanted Jamie to the exclusion of all others—what were the precise words of the marriage service, before linguistic meddling had destroyed its poetry? Forsaking all others? What a powerful, resonant word was forsake. The phrase forsaking all others meant so much more, made its point so much more emphatically than its weaker alternatives.

There you are," said Mma Makutsi. "Women have been tricked. They have tricked us, Mma. And we walked into their trap like cattle.

like yearning to be a swan when you were demonstrably a bird of a different feather;

It was a prolonged, mournful howl, into which Cyril put all the sorrow of the canine condition: a howl that seemed to express deep nostalgia for the woods, for the snowy wastes of his lupine ancestors' ancient homelands, for all the sense of loss and separation that a dog feels when his master, his reason for living, his sun, is no longer there.

It transpired that he was an electricity thief. We would have imagined many things of which he might be guilty—many unspeakable things…

And that, in a way, was the burden of being a philosopher: one knew what one had to do, but it was so often the opposite of what one really wanted to do.

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.

The problem, of course, was that people did not seem to understand the difference between right and wrong. They needed to be reminded about 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 then they would call that the right thing.

Mma Makutsi was unconvinced. "Where there is smoke there's fire, Mma. I have always said that." Mma Ramotswe could not let that pass. "But what does Clovis Andersen say in The Principles of Private Detection, Mma? Does he not say that you must be very careful to decide where the smoke is coming from? Smoke can drift, Mma. Those were his exact words, I think.

There's a daughter, but she's not quite right, I believe. Unfortunately she's a bit glaikit." He used the Scots word for mental handicap. It was not a word that many used any more, preferring learning difficulties, the modern euphemism. But there was nothing unkind about glaikit, which survived because the policing of language had not extended to the Scots lexicon.

You simply could not help everybody; but you could at least help those who came into your life. That principle allowed you to deal with the suffering you saw. That was your suffering. Other people would have to deal with the suffering that they, in their turn, came across.

He's called Ottolenghi, that chef. And he deserves a tongue twister of his own. Lo, Ottolenghi lengthens leeks laterally. How about that? Or, Competent chefs count cous cous cautiously?

I promise to share all my worldly goods-including letters, parcels and other items of correspondence, opened or unopened.