Quotes from Alexander McCall Smith

Minty's in a bit of trouble, and he was not surprised. He said something about her sailing too close to the wind.

Mothers need to be ambitious for their children otherwise. . .well, nobody would ever learn the piano.

Had he sailed too close to the wind? No, in his case another meteorological metaphor was appropriate perhaps: he had reaped whirlwinds—or at least what he had sown. She looked at her watch.

But she would not participate in that sort of thing, even if it meant that she lost the election. If you won on the basis of lies and false promises—bribes, really—then your victory would be a hollow one.

He said that it should be on the basis of need. People who couldn't come up with a good reason to drive would not be allocated a licence. They would have to use public transport." Ulf sighed. This was typical of the Moderate Extremists: an impossible policy, dressed up in Utopian language, and destined—if not actually calculated—to antagonise at least one large segment of the population.

and took us to the end of long, dark tunnels, which were filled with green rock and dust. My job was to load rock after it had been blasted, and I did this for seven hours a day. I grew

Sometimes the world seemed so unfair: good people were tricked or bullied by bad people, and the bad people seemed to get away with it. If only he could do something about it, he said to himself. But then he thought: What can I possibly do? And the answer, it seemed to him, was: Not much.

for most of us there was a central, unavoidable problem— the world was populated by people who were unlike us . That explained so many wars— particularly religious ones; that explained persecutions and injustices; that explained simple everyday irritation with one's fellow man: They were just not like us.

There had been a long article about the resurgence of stoicism in a newspaper he had picked up in the coffee bar—some of it, he recalled, underlined in red ink by an unknown reader. That happened to many of the newspapers and magazines there—somebody was furtively, and selectively, underlining certain things in red.

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.

all those things that sound so right were often just poetry, really—the gravy we put on reality to make it taste a bit better.

to people who are unhappy inside themselves. There is room for everyone. Everyone should be able to find somewhere on this earth to sit down.

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.

was particularly hard for women now, when there were so many children left without

The obvious, Ulf once observed, is rarely the obvious until the passage of time has proved it so.

That was what the story of Goldilocks and the three bears was all about: breach of trust.

modern people always appeared to be rushing about doing things, having no time, it seemed, for looking at the sky

I can't think of anything to send a memo about," he said. "And anyway, there was that memo we got the other day telling us not to send too many memos.

Trust your nose, but make sure it's pointing in the right direction.

chairs are public, and one only needs to seek permission to sit in another's chair if the owner of the room is present; once you were by yourself, any chair was fair game. Except the chairs of really important people—one should not sit on a throne when left unattended in a monarch's throne room; that really was going too far. And yet who would miss such an opportunity? There could surely be little doubt but that visitors

Wise people had been replaced in the public estimation by that curious category of people—celebrities—who were, for the most part, shallow people not known for their wisdom. Where were the Nelson Mandelas of this world of celebrity?

A marriage, she had learned, is seldom what it seems to be on the surface; what appears to be the most equable, well settled of arrangements might be a seething mass of discontent and resentment underneath. And conversely, chaotic and noisy relationships, littered with conflict and infidelity, might prove to be the most durable of unions.

This car was a Rover 90, made in 1955, and therefore very old.

Ulf's life, normally so settled and so ordered, had now become markedly more complicated. What had been the Bim Sundström case had now become the Signe Magnusson investigation, and had, in the process, transformed itself from a case of the suspected non-disappearance of a non-existent person to one involving the actual disappearance of a real person.