Quotes from Alexander McCall Smith

Siamo quelle che per prime hanno arato la terra quando Modise (Dio) la creò» , recitava un antico poema setswana. «Noi siamo quelle che preparano il cibo. Noi siamo quelle che badano agli uomini quando sono ancora bambini, quando sono giovanotti e quando sono vecchi e in procinto di morire. Noi ci siamo sempre. Ma siamo solo donne, e nessuno ci vede.»

Great feuds often need very few words to resolve them. Disputes, even between nations, between peoples, can be set to rest with simple acts of contrition and corresponding forgiveness, can so often be shown to be based on nothing much other than pride and misunderstanding, and the forgetting of the humanity of the other—and

Hello, honey," he said. "You are a very nice fat lady. I like a soft mattress." She drew in her breath. "Then go home and lie down on your bed," she said. "Go back to your wife. I know her, by the way.

But that's what the world is all about, Jamie. Stories. Stories explain everything, bring everything together.

Cover hatred and fear with love and delight, and with innocent things. With love and delight, and with innocent things. The trouble was that people were cynical about innocent things, or too embarrassed to celebrate them. The proponents of confrontation, violence, the acerbic comment, laughed at innocent things, thought them naïve, considered them beneath them. How easy it was to destroy the civilised structures of the world; how easy to poison the wells.

Now that you are going to be my wife, I must teach you what wives are for" (pg.53)

That was the marvelous thing about going back to one's roots; there was no need for explanation.

He fingered the note, as if it were a talisman. A letter from a lover is always like that, he thought. It carries the sympathetic magic of the hand that wrote it; that hand. He

Society may be post-Christian, but could hardly ignore its Judeo-Christian past; we did not, after all, come from nowhere.

I've never played,' said von Igelfeld. 'Nor I,' said Unterholzer. 'Chess, yes. Tennis no.' 'But that's no reason not to play,' von Igelfeld added quickly. 'Tennis, like any activity, can be mastered if one knows the principles behind it. In that respect it must be like language. The understanding of simple rules produces an understanding of a language. What could be simpler?

That was the problem with being a philosopher: it was not easy. As a philosopher one could not believe in just one thing; one had to explore the possibility that what one thought was true might be false; that what one wanted to believe might not be what one really should hold to be true. So much for the examined life: how uncomfortable it could be. But at least she knew what she wanted for lunch.

It was safer, he thought, to keep it to himself; because there are many ways of loving.

There were some things that one could stop, or try to stop, but it was a mistake to go through life trying to interfere in things that were beyond your control, or which were going to happen anyway, no matter what you did. A certain amount of acceptance—which was not the same thing as cowardice, or indifference—was necessary or you would spend your life burning up with annoyance and rage.

Were there any idle people left? In the past, there had seemed to be plenty of those, but they had either stopped being idle or had managed to conceal their idleness behind a façade of being busy.

It occurred to Mma Ramotswe that such behaviour was no more than ignorance; an inability to understand the hopes and aspirations of others. That understanding, thought Mma Ramotswe, was the beginning of all morality. If you knew how a person was feeling, if you could imagine yourself in her position, then surely it would be impossible to inflict further pain. Inflicting pain in such circumstances would be like hurting oneself.

I am immensely fortunate. I am alive. In this vast cosmos of swirling planets, so many of them sterile and dead, baking or swathed in clouds of methane or whatever it is they are swathed in, I am alive in a dear green place…and there is somebody who actually loves me.

These men were like leeches; they sucked away at the goodness of a woman's heart until it was dry and all her love had been used" (pg.46)

But the real question, boys, is this: do we have a duty to do anything to stop things we may not like? Is it all right just to do nothing, provided that we don't do anything that makes matters worse?

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

have misgivings about people not having a spiritual life. It's so Ã¢â'¬Â¦ so shallow. I sometimes think that life without a spiritual dimension must be like being made of cardboard—and as deep and satisfying." She paused. "I feel that there is something there—some force, or truth, perhaps—to put it at its most general. I sense it, and I suppose I'd even go so far as to say that I yearn for it. I want it to be. Maybe that's God.

was astonishing how life had a way of working out, even when everything looked so complicated and unpromising.

Charity begins at home. Was that a narrow, selfish adage or was it simply an inescapable, bedrock fact of life in human society? Does the one in need on your doorstep have a greater claim than the one in need in a distant country--if the level of need in each case is exactly the same?

It was the feeling, she imagined, that one had when vouchsafed a vision. Everything is changed, becomes more blessed, making the humblest of surroundings a holy place

Maybe not," mused Maggie. "If we eat pies, then we should never, not for one moment, look down on the making of them." "I don't," said William.