Top 100 Alexander McCall Smith Quotes
#2. Every novel presents a slice of life. A noir policier for example presents one slice, one that perhaps addresses social dysfunction or some sort of pathology, while mine present a slice that is more upbeat and affirmative.
Alexander McCall Smith
#3. And took us to the end of long, dark tunnels, which were filled with green rock and dust. My job was to load rock after it had been blasted, and I did this for seven hours a day. I grew
Alexander McCall Smith
#4. Isabel saw the intimacy of the gestures and felt immediately empty, a sensation so physical and so overwhelming that she felt for a moment that she might stop breathing, being empty of air
Alexander McCall Smith
#5. None of us, she thought, wants the world we know to come to an end; we do not want familiar things to be taken from us.
Alexander McCall Smith
#6. The physical world - the world of stone and brick - is indifferent to our suffering, to our dramas, she thought. Even a battlefield can be peaceful, can be a place for flowers to grow, for children to play; the memories, the sadness, are within us, not part of the world about us.
Alexander McCall Smith
#7. And the problem was that there was a positive epidemic of narcissism, encouraged by commercial manipulation and by the shallow values of Hollywood films. And interestingly enough, the real growth area was male narcissism.
Alexander McCall Smith
#9. But who doesn't have a lot of unread books? It's nice, though, to know they are there.
Alexander McCall Smith
#11. Writers just play out their fantasies in their books. They are often very unstable, tricky people, Bertie. Writers are usually very bad at real life and feel that they have to create imaginary lives to make up for it.
Alexander McCall Smith
#12. There was corruption at every turn, and those who stood for honesty and integrity were more and more vulnerable, more and more isolated amongst the hordes of people who simply had no moral sense. And
Alexander McCall Smith
#13. My parents were very supportive and always encouraged us. My father was a gentle, nice man. My mother was quite a colorful character and a keen reader who encouraged me to write.
Alexander McCall Smith
#14. And it was young men in red cars who were the most dangerous of all. Such people were best given a wide berth, both in and out of the car.
Alexander McCall Smith
#16. The problem with being me, thought Isabel, as she walked along George IV Bridge, is that I keep thinking about the problem of being me.
Alexander McCall Smith
#18. Baboons take a bit of getting to know but, apparently, once you break the ice, so to speak, they are complex and interesting creatures with elaborate societies.
Alexander McCall Smith
#19. He knew that one should not punch people who annoyed one, although there was a case for it at times, a seemingly irresistible case.
Alexander McCall Smith
#21. Words that are full of hurt sometimes need to be left in the air where they have been spoken.
Alexander McCall Smith
#23. 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.
Alexander McCall Smith
#25. Isabel smiled. She liked a conversation that went in odd directions; she liked the idea of playfulness in speech. People could be so depressingly literal. Jamie
Alexander McCall Smith
#26. It's through the small things that we develop our moral imagination, so that we can understand the sufferings of others.
Alexander McCall Smith
#27. If more women were in power, they wouldn't let wars break out," she said. "Women can't be bothered with all this fighting. We see war for what it is- a matter of broken bodies and crying mothers.
Alexander McCall Smith
#28. Great art, she felt, had a calming effect on the viewer; it made one stop in awe, which is exactly what Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol did not do. You did not stop in awe. They stopped you in your tracks, perhaps, but that was not the same thing; awe was something quite different
Alexander McCall Smith
#29. Has it ever occurred to people that love at first sight might be the rule rather than the exception? How many people fall in love gradually rather than on the first occasion they meet the other person?
Alexander McCall Smith
#30. To be able to imagine the ohter, and the experience of the other was what wisdome was all about; but nobody talked about wisdom very much anymore, nor virtue perhaps because wisdom was nto appreciated in a world of glitz and effect.
Alexander McCall Smith
#31. This was a townscape raised in the teeth of cold winds from the east; a city of winding cobbled streets and haughty pillars; a city of dark nights and candlelight, and intellect.
Alexander McCall Smith
#32. We all have people in our lives we don't really choose as friends but with whom we're, well, lumbered, I suppose. Heart-sink friends.
Alexander McCall Smith
#33. He took a deep breath. 'To marry me,' he said quietly. It was easier than he thought. Icarus did not fall from the sky; the ground did not open; the earth did not wobble on its trajectory.
Alexander McCall Smith
#35. Emma was happy. She realized that happiness is something that springs from the generous treatment of others, and that until one makes that connection, happiness may prove elusive.
Alexander McCall Smith
#37. 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.
Alexander McCall Smith
#38. If you did not keep your yard in reasonable order, then your whole life would be similarly untidy. A messy yard told Mma Ramotswe everything she needed to know about its owner.
Alexander McCall Smith
#39. But we make such mistakes all the time, all through our lives. Wisdom, I suppose, is seeing this and acting upon it before it is too late. But it is often too late, isn't it? - and those things that we should have said are unsaid, and remain unsaid for ever.
Alexander McCall Smith
#40. The new lover, of a few weeks standing, may seem more precious than friends of decades.
Alexander McCall Smith
#41. It was safer, he thought, to keep it to himself; because there are many ways of loving.
Alexander McCall Smith
#42. It was difficult to think what to do, and, as she often did in such circumstances, Mma Ramotswe decided that the best thing to do would be to go shopping.
Alexander McCall Smith
#43. How many of us are happy to be exactly where we are at any moment? ... only the completely happy think that they are in the correct place.
Alexander McCall Smith
#44. The local community is very important in one's life; the feelings of identification with a place and people.
Alexander McCall Smith
#46. So it was perfectly possible that there were men who liked shopping, men who understood exactly what it was all about, but Mma Ramotwe had yet to meet such a man. Maybe they existed elsewhere - in France, perhaps - but they did not seem to be much in evidence in Botswana.
Alexander McCall Smith
#47. He looked up from his stew. "Mma Ramotswe," he said, "you can do anything. Nothing is too hard for a person like you - nothing. You are very good at doing everything, Mma, and anything you do, Mma
Alexander McCall Smith
#48. It was all a question of face, she decided: you had to leave room for face to be saved.
Alexander McCall Smith
#49. Traditional Botswana men like ladies who are more traditionally shaped. You and I, Mma. We remind men of how things used to be in Botswana before these modern-shaped ladies started to get men all confused.
Alexander McCall Smith
#50. Why should everybody embrace the herd instinct, which required one to regard one set of politicians as being always in the right while demonizing another set?
Alexander McCall Smith
#51. We put on our walls what we think is beautiful or inspiring, and if others think that it is manufactured or shallow, then they need not have it on their walls.
Alexander McCall Smith
#52. The whole point about childhood," Domenica went on, "is that it affords us a brief moment of innocence and protection from the pressures of the world. Parents who push their children too hard intrude on that little bit of space.
Alexander McCall Smith
#53. Martha simply did not know that virtually everything she said was inappropriate, and so there was no point in remonstrating with her.
Alexander McCall Smith
#54. Our heads may be small, but they are as full of memories as the sky may sometimes be full of swarming bees, thousands and thousands of memories, of smells, of places, of little things that happened to us and which come back, unexpectedly, to remind us who we are. And who am I?
Alexander McCall Smith
#56. People who do that sort of thing may reap what they sow, but they also destroy the harvest of those who are around them.
Alexander McCall Smith
#57. No, the idea of a benevolent god was very much an exception in the enormous pantheon of gods that people had invented over the course of human history.
Alexander McCall Smith
#58. I would never inflict my bassoon on anybody really other than the long suffering audiences that come to the concerts of The Really Terrible Orchestra; which actually is really terrible.
Alexander McCall Smith
#59. 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.
Alexander McCall Smith
#60. ... people decided what they thought and would not be moved, not even by the most patient, the most rational argument.
Alexander McCall Smith
#61. It was all very well occupying the moral high ground on electoral reform, but what really mattered, she thought, was how you treated your mother.
Alexander McCall Smith
#63. Do you realise that people die of boredom in London suburbs? It's the second biggest cause of death amongs the English in general. Sheer boredom ...
Alexander McCall Smith
#64. You should have seen him," she said. "A real ladies' man. Stuff in his hair. Dark glasses. Fancy shoes. He had no idea how funny he looked. I much prefer men with ordinary shoes and honest trousers.
Alexander McCall Smith
#65. There are some people who should not be allowed on the road. Maybe they shouldn't even be allowed to walk anywhere, either. Maybe we should hang a large sign around their neck saying 'Very Dangerous', or 'No Sense', or something like that.
Alexander McCall Smith
#66. ...it made me think of everything I had done. It made me weigh up my life. And it made me want to tie things up, so that next time - and I hope there will not be a next time - the next time I faced death like that, I could think: I have set me life in order.
Alexander McCall Smith
#67. 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.
Alexander McCall Smith
#68. If we treated others with the consideration that one would give to those who only had a few days to live, then we would be kinder, at least.
Alexander McCall Smith
#69. But only if youses shift yoursels and get in. He used the demotic plural of you, a common feature of speech in Scotland.
Alexander McCall Smith
#70. And the memory made her humble; for we should not forget what it is to be young and to have ideas and attitudes that may later seem so fanciful.
Alexander McCall Smith
#71. The unmerited dislike of another made one think less of oneself. We are enlarged by the love of others; we are diminished by their dislike.
Alexander McCall Smith
#72. 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.
Alexander McCall Smith
#74. We all had to say goodbye, sooner or later, to those we love
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.
Alexander McCall Smith
#75. Oh I love gadgets and I pride myself on keeping at the cutting edge of technology.
Alexander McCall Smith
#76. As a writer I've learned certain lessons. One of them is to be careful about how you put a view, and to bear in mind how easily and readily you'll be misinterpreted.
Alexander McCall Smith
#77. 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.
Alexander McCall Smith
#79. As a writer, I have readers who will have a range of political views. I don't think they look to me for political guidance.
Alexander McCall Smith
#80. Although she had only started being a detective, Precious was well aware that you had to be able to show people something if you wanted them to believe it.
Alexander McCall Smith
#82. That's the curious thing about love, isn't it? It makes very ordinary things seem special. It makes them seem so much more valuable than they really are.
Alexander McCall Smith
#83. Perhaps this was a concomitant of freedom: if people were free, then some of them, at least, would be free of the constraints of good taste. Perhaps
Alexander McCall Smith
#84. This was what it meant to live in Botswana; when the rest of the world might work itself into a frenzy of activity, one might still sit, in the space before a house with ochre walls, a mug of bush tea in one's hand, and talk about very small things: headmen in wells, goats and jealousy.
Alexander McCall Smith
#85. The point about love, the essential point, was that we loved what we loved. We did not choose. We just loved.
Alexander McCall Smith
#86. She was, in fact, often wrong
and knew it. Life became difficult when those who were often wrong did not know it.
Alexander McCall Smith
#87. I think that the measure of whether a life has been a good one is how much love there has been in that life
love both given and received.
Alexander McCall Smith
#88. The night is a very bad time for questions to which there are no answers." Mr Badule looked at her. "You are very right, my sister. There is
Alexander McCall Smith
#89. Do not allow the profession of which you are a member to induce you to take a bleak view of humanity. You will encounter all sorts of bad behavior but do not judge everybody by the standards of the lowest. If you
Alexander McCall Smith
#90. Many of my books are written from a female perspective. I rather enjoy the take that women have on the world, and certainly I enjoy the conversations that women have.
Alexander McCall Smith
#92. 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.
Alexander McCall Smith
#93. And the beautiful are forgiven; no matter how egregious their shortcomings, they are forgiven.
Alexander McCall Smith
#94. That is important," said Mma Makutsi from behind her desk. "One does not want a lady who talks too much.
Alexander McCall Smith
#95. It would be wonderful, she thought, to write a book which would help other people.
Alexander McCall Smith
#96. But don't we often lie to people we love, or not tell them things, precisely because we love them?
Alexander McCall Smith
#97. That would have been taken out of the Munrowe voice two or three generations ago through being educated at schools that modelled themselves on the English public-school system, even if they were in Scotland.
Alexander McCall Smith
#98. Pleasure at hearing what all of us wanted to hear at least occasionally: that there was somebody who liked us, whatever our faults, and liked us sufficiently to say so. - Precious Ramotswe
Alexander McCall Smith
#99. French philosophers had been able to admire Mao and his works because they did not have to live in China at the time.
Alexander McCall Smith
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