Quotes from Alexander McCall Smith

The queue for happiness was not well ordered, he thought; it stretched out and wound round corners, and sometimes, it seemed, the end was so hard to see.

To be free Is often to be lonely. He would unite The unequal moieties fractured By our own well-meaning sense of justice Would restore to the larger the wit and will The smaller possess but can only use For arid disputes, would give back to The son the mother's richness of feeling …

Already many of the memories of the previous two weeks had faded: the smell of that small hotel in St. Andrews; that mixture of bacon cooking for breakfast and the lavender-scented soap in the bathroom; the air from the sea drifing across the golf course; the aroma of coffee in the coffee bar in South Street. She should have noted them down. She should have said something about all that and the light and the hills with sheep on them like small white stones.

There are old mycologists and there are bold mycologists, but there are no old, bold mycologists.

all the good things that we have in life are on temporary loan, at best, and can be taken away from us in an instant.

we must love those with whom we live and work, and love them for all their failings, manifest and manifold though they be.

There are many more kind people than not-so-kind people," said Mma Ramotswe.

The important thing is to carry on doing what you're doing,' she said. 'And not to do what you think other people think you should do. You should do what you do as well as you possibly can.

she knew that this man, this mechanic, this fixer of machines with their broken hearts, did indeed love and admire her—was like walking in the sunshine;

had been too young, and too infatuated with the plausible

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.

Most theories and ideologies claimed to explain the world, or some aspect of it, but did not in any real sense influence the world. Underneath everything, beneath the layers of explanation that we created, beneath all our elaborate protocols, people still did exactly as they wanted to do. In other words, you did not change human nature by inventing a theory of human nature.

You were looking for somebody, and there was somebody, and you would convince yourself that this random person was what you were really looking for in the first place.

high heels were always a temptation, but, like all temptations, one paid for them later...

The sight of such beauty can make us quiet with fear; fear that it might not be real, fear that it might be taken from us, as is everything that we love, which is only on loan to us.

It was reasonable enough, of course, for people to wish to speak to a man, if that is what they wanted, but that did not mean that a man would be better.

The trouble with having a conscience, she said to herself, is that it never sleeps.

Those regularly-featured Hollywood males made her feel slightly nauseous; and the same could be said for their female equivalents, hardly intellectuals they. These people had regular features but were actually ugly because they tended to be so completely vacuous. Regularity without some metaphysical value behind it, some beauty of soul or character, was more disappointing – and indeed repulsive – than the honestly haphazard, the humanly messy.

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.

There is a marked decline in something we value. It's the destruction of civility, said the Duke. Twenty years ago, people may have had their differences of opinion - of course they did- but they did not abuse one another for it. They respected those with whom they disagreed. They spoke courteously.

Her tone was breezy. That, she thought, was the best way to talk to teenagers—about anything. You talked to them in that way, as if you were not expecting them to be listening to you—which, of course, they were not.

At the heart of Scots culture, though, was an awful interdiction of such emotional closeness between men and women; a terrible separation inflicted by a distorted football-obsessed emotional tyranny, such a deep injury of the soul.

the past has a much bigger shadow than people believe. It's still with us in so many ways. At our side all the time, whispering into our ear.

Some of my friends who play rugby talk about Murrayfield Stadium as sacred turf.