Quotes from Alexander McCall Smith

There's a difference, I think, between falling in love and knowing it.

The Morning After Coffee Bar was different from the mass-produced coffee bars that had mushroomed on every street almost everywhere, a development which presaged the flattening effects of globalisation; the spreading, under a cheerful banner, of a sameness that threatened to weaken and destroy all sense of place.

It was time for tea as it so often was.

She felt that she had revealed something to Cat, and with revealing something about oneself there always comes a sense of lightening of the load that we all carry; the load of being ourselves.

It's a different sort of love taht puts up with illness. Old love.

Resolution. Musicians know all about that, don't they? Pieces of music seek resolution, have to end on a particular note, or it sounds all wrong. The same applies to our lives. It's exactly the same.

Moisturiser and a good cry: two things for modern men to think about.

Can you forgive her? Can you do that? There was no response. Because if you can start to forgive, then it will become easier. And? And then you will be able to forgive yourself—and ask others to forgive you.

Everything is possible in love. In the heart of each of us there can be many rooms, and sometimes there are.

You say that you lost your child. You know how I feel then. You know that, don't you? It's a sadness that never goes away.

She remembered love, though, and a feeling of warmth. It was like remembering light, or the glow that sometimes persists after a light has gone out.

She had been tied to an incubus, the memory of a love that had been rejected and had had nowhere to go; she had been locked into a dead relationship and now the last dried skin of it had fallen away, like the scab on a wound, and she was free.

There was no word for self-pity in the language of the north-east of Scotland - the nearest being a word which is defined in the Scots dictionary as being 'a term used to express self-reproach on paying too much for something.

It was easy to make a difference to other people's lives, so easy to change the little room in which people lived their life.

There is a difference between a challenge and a burden. One is something you can carry on your shoulders easily enough—the other is something, a big sack, that bends you double.

Mma Ramotswe was right: evil repaid with retribution, with punishment, had achieved half its goal; evil repaid with kindness was shown to be what it really was, a small, petty thing, not something frightening at all, but something pitiable, a paltry affair.

The young rarely believe that they will not be able to get what they want, because there is always an open future.

The trouble with the world today, she thought, was that people were not prepared to stand up to bad behaviour. They looked away

She hoped that her baby was happy and would be waiting for her when she herself left Botswana and went to heaven. Would Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni get round to naming a wedding date before then? She hoped so, although he certainly seemed to be taking his time. Perhaps they could get married in heaven, if he left it too late. That would certainly be cheaper.

it must be odd to have no ambition, not to want something more.

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.

We need a person whom we can make our little god on this earth, as the old Kgatla saying had it. Whether it was a spouse, or a child, or a parent, or anybody else for that matter, there must be somebody who gives our lives purpose.

nobody dared in those days to question such bullies, and the freedom that is more normal these days has come too late for these victims. Auden would have helped, because the whole message of his life and his poetry is the antithesis of cruelty and meanness of spirit.

It is the search for beauty...That is what it is. We find ourselves on this earth--gods and men--and we know that it is beautiful. That is one of the few things we understand--beauty; because it is there, in the world, and we can see it all about us. We want beauty. It requires our love. It just does.