Quotes from Alexander McCall Smith

Africa will get nowhere until we have mechanics... Mechanics are the first stone in the building. Then there are other people on top. Doctors. Nurses. Teachers. But the whole thing is built on mechanics. That is why it is important to teach young people to be mechanics.

Are we facing a new Dark Age, Angus? Possibly, Lou. A dark age in which our concentration spell is this long.

IF EITHER OF THEM had felt tetchy, the concert put them both in a good mood.

Most children have become very surly. That is because they are not taught to think about others any more. They are, quite simply, spoiled.

When she had lived in Bobonong the houses seemed perfectly normal to her and the house in which her family lived had seemed quite comfortable. But looking at it with eyes that had seen Gaborone, and the large buildings there, their house had seemed mean and cramped.

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.

all the dilemmas and headaches that could make life a moral minefield.

these people had a house on a beach and sat on a marble terrace, which must have cost heaven knows what to import and they looked out at the sea. And there were no books in their house, not a single book. Not one..They had a daughter...who was as empty-headed as the parents and although they tried to do something about her education, nothing much got in. She had a baby, and the baby had nothing much in its head either.

It was a stark choice: shoes or food; beauty or sustenance; the sensible or the self-indulgent. I'll take the shoes, she said firmly.

You can only wear one pair of shoes at a time," she said. "Rich people are like the rest of us—two feet, ten toes. We are all the same that way.

she had not had the time to love her children, because all her energy was spent in simply keeping them alive.

As she spoke, Isabel found herself thinking of the power of words. A single word, a phrase, a sentence or two could have such extraordinary power; could end a world, break a heart or, as in this case, consign another to moral purdah.

she realised that he was probably right. Time was running out in so many respects—for our tenancy of a world that we were despoiling at an unsustainable rate as well as for the survival of our species in the face of nuclear proliferation. Obviously, this was evident from Hogget Road, Auchtermuchty, but not necessarily appreciated in the centres of world power. How frustrating it must be, she thought, for Mr. Archibald P. Raeburn to know this and yet to be powerless to do much about it.

Yes, but not in chairs that don't belong to us," countered Mma Makutsi. "That's the trouble with this country, Mma—there are too many people sitting down in other people's chairs.

What we have, we all must lose—that applied to everything, even to that which we thought we had the greatest right. We were tenants of this earth—nothing more.

We were not the first people to tread where we now trod; countless ancestors had come exactly this way. And although their footprints might have been blown away by the wind, we could sense their presence if only we opened our eyes and ears to it. And we could hear their voices, too, if we listened hard enough. We could hear their warnings, their encouragements, their advice - if only we turned our head to the wind and heard the voices, faint and distant, that the wind carried

Moral codes were not designed to be selective, nor indeed were they designed to be questioned. You could not say that you would observe this prohibition but not that. I shall not commit theft -- certainly not -- but adultery is another matter: wrong for other people, but not for me.

He's not too bad, actually. If you don't mind him going on about Byzantium, he can be quite nice.

It was another of Mma Makutsi's odd statements—utterly unfounded in fact, Mma Ramotswe suspected, but not a point that she wished to argue. As far as she was concerned, if a chair was empty, then anybody should be welcome to sit in it. We should share our chairs, she felt. Maybe that was the real problem with the modern world—not enough of us were prepared to share our chairs.

In the lives of most of us, the list of unsaid things was, he thought, a long one.

Some people mocked you if you said that you joined others when your time came. Well, they could laugh, those clever people, but we surely had to hope, and a life without hope of any sort was no life: it was a sky without stars, a landscape of sorrow and emptiness.

people who believed not that the end was coming—as some people did—but that it had actually come, and we had simply failed to notice

a cloud of dust thrown up behind her white van like the vapour trail of a high-flying aircraft

She liked such stories because it helped people to believe in justice, which we had to believe in if we were not simply to give up in the face of adversity.