Quotes from Alexander McCall Smith

This was the difficulty with laws and with legal language: they used language which very few people, apart from lawyers, understood. Penal codes, then, were all very well, but she wondered whether it might not be simpler to rely on something like the Ten Commandments, which, with a bit of modernization, seemed to give a perfectly good set of guidelines for the conduct of one's life...

No buts, Bertie. If you don't keep your promise then you'll get into serious trouble. Big time. You could go to prison, and then what? And there's God too. God watches these things and if he sees you breaking promises he can really get you. He does it all the time.

Unless we do something about the past, she thought, then it will weigh us down to such an extent that we simply cannot move. Is that what I want?

YOU DO NOT CHANGE PEOPLE BY SHOUTING AT THEM

The expression, a bit of drama, was used by Domenica to describe anything from Chernobyl to running out of Earl Grey tea, and so Angus was not alarmed by this portentous opening.

But the problem is that even if you know that is the best thing to do, you often don't do it. ...it is true. It's as if there were two people inside you. One says: do this. Another says: do that. But both voices are inside the same person.

a prison of put-downs and belittlements.

But she had never once regretted what she had done under the influence of tea, and would not start doing so now.

But then she reminded herself that there were plenty of people who were afraid of the police, even if they had clear consciences. These were people who had been the victims of bullying when young--bullying by severe teachers, by stronger children; there were so many ways in which people could be crushed. Such people might feat the police in the same way in which they feared all authority.

The juvenile adage Never kiss and tell had a sound moral instinct behind it.

I think it is time that I put the kettle on

Sometimes there were doubts, and those doubts could persist, but often you really had no choice. You had to feel your way through the complexities of this life and hope, just hope, that you got it right more often than you got it wrong.

She wondered whether there was any way of getting him to take the pills by trickery. She did not like the idea of using underhand methods with Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, but when a person's reason was disturbed, then she thought that any means were justified in getting them better. It was as if a person had been kidnapped by some evil being and held ransom. You would not hesitate, she felt, to resort to trickery to defeat the evil being.

He had very few criticisms to make of Precious Ramotswe, his wife and founder of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, but if one were to make a list of her faults—which would be a minuscule document, barely visible, indeed, to the naked eye—one would perhaps have to include a tendency (only a slight tendency, of course) to claim that things that she happened to believe were well known.

we all have some things we are ashamed of.

people decided what they thought and would not be moved, not even by the most patient, the most rational argument.

YES, THOUGHT Mma Ramotswe, the world can be very discouraging. But we cannot sit and think about all the things that have gone wrong, or could go wrong. There was no point in doing that because it only made things worse. There was much for which we could be grateful, whatever the sorrows of this world. Besides, dwelling on the trials and tribulations of life was time-consuming, and ordinary duties still have to be performed; livings have to be earned

But look at it now: a detective agency, right here in Gaborone, with me, the fat lady detective, sitting outside and thinking these thoughts about how what is one thing today becomes quite another thing tomorrow.

All that I know is that he is sad in his heart...that is the place where his sadness is. Right there. And I do not think that is ever very easy to deal with sadness in that part of the body.

The real art in going through life with dignity and with a modicum of happiness was to accept what you were, and, at the same time, to accept others—and to love them all equally. That was hard, and for some people it was impossible, but you had to try. We were all brothers and sisters, after all, and should embrace one another as such. That seemed so obvious, and yet there were people who refused to accept it, and made others unhappy because of their refusal.

You can lose a piece of plain bread and not think twice about it, but when you lose one spread thickly with strawberry jam it's an altogether more serious matter.

unconscionable–eating the food in a supermarket was simply theft, and could be distinguished from shoplifting only by virtue of the nature of the container used to remove the property.

Mma Ramotswe smiled at her old friend. You can go through life and make new friends every year -- every month practically -- but there was never any substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive into adult years. Those are the ones in which we are bound to one another with hoops of steel. She reached out and touched Dr. Maketsi on the arm, gently, as old friends will sometimes do when they have nothing more to say.

Elle avait ainsi gardé cette éventualité à l'esprit, enfouie parmi ces autres fragments d'espoir avec lesquels nous traversons la vie, sans y penser beaucoup, mais résolus à ne pas les laisser tout à fait s'évanouir.