Quotes from Alexander McCall Smith

Everybody kissed one another these days; kisses meant nothing.

He wondered why he had ignored parental advice, and decided that it was because it was parental – that was why.

Yes, she agreed, there are times when I am unhappy and times when I am happy. There are more happy times than unhappy ones, I think.

Christine's tone bordered on the dismissive: there were ways of pronouncing cricket that indicated disapproval.

And if things go on as they are, in a few months the men will have cut all the trees down and that will be the end of the bubblegum tree - forever'. Nobody said anything. Billy thought that he had never heard such a sad story before. Surely somebody could do something before the bubblegum trees before it was too late.

There are many words for push, take, shove, carry, load, and no words for love, or happiness, or the sounds which birds make in the morning.

James sniffed at the soup. "I love porcini to bits," he said. "They're the only mushroom I'd go out of my way for." "What about chanterelles?" said Matthew. "Porcini are delicious, but so are chanterelles.

sometimes the people who were closest to you were also those who were furthest away.

Everything, thought Mama Ramotswe, has been something before.

The signals confused Mma Ramotswe; she knew the Indian habit of moving the head from side to side meant the opposite of what it meant elsewhere and signified approval rather than disagreement, but she was not sure what a combination of movements meant. Perhaps there was something wrong with Mr. Sengupta; perhaps his head was loose.

It was a voice that you felt you had to listen to—or you ignored at your peril.

La bella figura...it's at the heart of Italian life...it's about doing things beautifully.

There's a poem about onions," she said. "It's about how memory is like an onion—it makes you cry.

especially when it came to his triumphant denunciations of his political enemies, each of whom, she suspected, were only too relieved that it was him rather than they who had been caught. She

Mma Makutsi made tea. Mma Pamotsue saw that she had a special supply of red bush tea specially for her, and was touched; that one woman should keep something in the house for the visit of another woman was a nice example of what friendship might be.

What I said to you was private. We can have private reservations about a person's work, but that doesn't mean to say that we have to spell those out to him. It's called tact, Isabel!

He did not sleep well.

She had forgiven him, yes, but she still did not like to remember. And perhaps a deliberate act of forgetting went along with forgiveness. You forgave and then you said to yourself: Now I shall forget. Because if you did not forget, then your forgiveness would be tested, perhaps many times and in ways that you could not resist, and you might go back to anger and to hating.

But emotions and detective work did not always mix; there was something about that in Clovis Andersen's The Principles of Private Detection. What had he said? Emotions have the same effect as a magnet has on a compass…Yes, that was it. The needle swings around in a confusing way and you lose direction.

The country must be full of liars," she continued. "There must be liars around every corner. Liars hiding behind every bush. Liars just waiting to tell lies about something. Unrepentant liars. Old liars, young liars; perhaps even babies whose first word is a lie. Perhaps

It was very sweet revenge, indeed. It was compensation for the garlic that was never to be. It was about garlic, and yearning, and disappointment, and justice. It was about so many things.

We don't forget...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, smells of places, of little things that happened to us and which come back, unexpectedly, to remind us of who we are.

Betjeman, called him sentimental, but he could hit the nail on the head when it came to describing people's feelings; and he had written there about a man coming out of a doctor's surgery, his X-ray photos tucked under his

If people came at you and started to scratch you, then of course you had the right to sit on them. Even Nelson Mandela, she told herself, who was a good and gentle man, would have agreed with that.