Quotes from Alexander McCall Smith

Hate was a welcoming host and would always encourage you to join its parties.

I think that may just be coincidence," Ulf said. "Sometimes we stumble over the truth. We think we find it, but it finds us.

The reunion, she decided, was an unnecessary and stressful complication to life. We did not need to reheat cold dishes from the past.

The most that many people could hope for was that they should not incur the wrath of gods whom they had failed to appease or propitiate; beyond that, gods should be left to get on with their proper business and mortals with theirs.

usually better to seek the advice of a stranger—not just any stranger, of course, as one could hardly go out onto the street and confide in the first person one encountered, but a stranger whom you knew to be wise.

People were only too ready to believe things that were manifestly untrue. When it came to remarks that portrayed others in a bad light, people were happy to believe things that showed others to be weak or flawed in some way: we believed that of them because it made us feel better; it was as simple as that.

This was loyalty of a sort which was rare in an age of self-indulgence. It was an old-fashioned virtue of the type which her philosophical colleagues extolled but could never themselves match.

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.

reunions, she felt, were not much more than a scratching at the vague itch of memory. And like scratching, they rarely helped—indeed, scratching often made matters worse, as any dermatologist would tell you.

Tea, thought Mma Ramotswe—no matter what was happening, no matter how difficult things became, there was always the tea break—that still moment, that unchangeable ritual, that survived everything, made normal the abnormal, renewed one's ability to cope with whatever the world laid before one. Tea.

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.

The more you listen, the more you learn.

but to the north there was a bank of cirro-cumulus, a mackerel sky, or Schaefchenwolken—"sheep cloud"—as she remembered her father calling it. For some reason he had used German when talking about clouds and sea conditions; an odd habit that she had accepted as just being one of the things he did. "The weather," he had once said to her, smiling, "is German. I don't know why; it just is. Sorry.

i cuori degli uomini che sono molto lontani dal loro Paese sono pieni di tristezze.

People punish themselves—sometimes for years. But it's not always necessary. Forgiveness allows everybody to start again, not to be burdened with a whole lot of old business.

But only if youses shift yoursels and get in." He used the demotic plural of you, a common feature of speech in Scotland.

Cake," said Mma Ramotswe quickly. "That is Mr J.L.B. Matekoni's great weakness. He cannot help himself when it comes to cake. He can be manipulated very easily if he has a plate of cake in his hand.

She was crying because she was far from home, and who among us has never wanted to do that? There need be no other reason; just that. We cry for home, and for flowers on tables, and biscuits in little tins, and for mother; and we feel embarrassed, and foolish too, that we should be crying for such things; but we should not feel that way because all of us, in a sense, have strayed from home, and wish to return.

but then where would one end if one started to compose a list of the wrongs that this world had seen? Better perhaps, thought Mma Ramotswe, to make a list of those things that were right with the world, of people who had made life better for other people, or who had done what they had been called to do with honour and without complaint.

That was always the case, she thought: the perfect riposte, the mot juste, inevitably occurred well after the event, and one could not really write to somebody and tell them what you would have said had you thought about it in time.

The more that people are in the wrong, she thought, the louder their protestations on being brought to book.

Memories of that which we have lost are curious things - weeks, months, even years may pass without recollection of them and then, quite suddenly, something will remind us of a lost friend, or of a favourite possession that has been mislaid or destroyed, and then we think: Yes, that is what I have had and I have no longer

She had lost her baby, and where was she? She hoped that her baby was happy and would be waiting for her when she 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.

Although she was unenthusiastic about theology, she had long since realised that the real point of prayer was not to flatter those addressed; prayer was a form of meditation, she decided, and it did not detract from its efficacy that nobody was listening.