Alexander McCall Smith Quotes

...is under active consideration.

Very ... " She left the word hanging. Very unfinished, thought Isabel. The woman finished her sentence. "Very beautiful." Oh, really! thought Isabel. The verdict from others was much the same. Oh well, thought Isabel. Perhaps I'm not sufficiently used to the language he's using. Music is not an international language, she thought, no matter how frequently that claim is made; some words of the language may be the same, but not all, and one needs to know the rules to understand what is being said. Perhaps I just don't understand the conventions by which Nick Smart is communicating with his audience.

She had noticed that there was a tendency on the part of some Americans to believe that everybody, deep inside, wanted to live in America, and that it was inexplicable that people who could do so did not.

But he'll never be fully recognised, because Scots literature these days is all about complaining and moaning and being injured in one's soul.

Serial novels have an unexpected effect; they hook the writer as well as the reader.

were in need of bodywork. It had always amused

She went on to say something else, but Jamie found his attention drifting. He was feeling sleepy, for it was warm, and he could lie there for ever, he thought, listening to the sound of Isabel's voice, in the way one listens to the conversations of birds, or the sound of a waterfall descending the side of a Scottish mountain; sounds for which we cannot come up with a meaning, but which we love dearly with all our heart, and loving anything with all your heart always brings understanding, in time.

You are a lucky lady to be marrying a man who can fix things. Most husbands just break things.

The forges of friendship, thought Angus, may be busy ones, but their dorrs are always open.

As a writer, you have to realize that people want to like the characters, so you have to be careful to keep them involved.

the vet and the wound

You can hear the train in those lines; you can feel its rocking motion.

As a child she had believed that wrongs would always be righted, that somehow the world would not let the innocent suffer, but now she realised that this was not true. Old oppressors were replaced by new ones, from another distant place or from right next door. Old lies were replaced by new ones, backed up by old threats.

It was, he thought, his gesture against the whole pro-euthanasia movement that talked so glibly of choice without realising the fire with which one played when tinkering with fragile taboos against killing others. Yes, he thought, Mrs Bates's life did not seem to amount to much, but to her it was all she had.

She knew as well as anyone that the world could be a place of trial and sorrow, that there was injustice and suffering and heartlessness - there was enough of all that to fill the great Kalahari twice over, but what good did it do to ponder that and that alone? None, she thought.

She would not allow herself to remember how Note had treated her, and many others too, she suspected. 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.

I am glad you are pleased," said Mma Ramotswe. "You have broken the glass ceiling that stops secretaries from reaching their full potential."
Mma Makutsi looked up, as if to search for the ceiling that she had broken. There were only the familiar ceiling boards, fly-tracked and buckling from the heat. But the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel itself could not at that moment have been more glorious in her eyes, more filled with hope and joy.

The difficulty, of course, with standing up to women was that it appeared to make little difference. At the end of the day,a man was no match for a woman ... The only thing to do was to try to avoid situations where women might corner you. And that was difficult, because women had a way of ensuring that you were neatly boxed in, which was exactly what had happened to him. He should have been more careful. He should have been on his guard when she offered him cake. That was her technique, he now understood; just as Eve had used an apple to trap Adam, so [she] had used fruit cake. Fruit cake, apples; it made no difference really. Oh foolish, weak men!

It was a good thing to be an African. There were terrible things that happened in Africa, things that brought shame and despair when one thought about them, but that was not all there was in Africa. However great the suffering of the people of Africa, however harrowing the cruelty and chaos brought about by soldiers - small boys with guns, really - there was still so much in Africa from which one could take real pride. There was the kindness, for example, and the ability to smile, and the art and the music.

The fear of what might happen in the future is almost always worse than the future that eventually arrives.

And yet, she suddenly wondered, should you actually lie about how much Proust you've read?

It had given her pleasure to do things for him in his lifetime, and now it was a pleasure to do things for his memory. But the memory of a father went only so far.

They are dazzled by all the money that they are being offered. That is what money does, Mma Ramotswe - you must have seen that. Sometime we need to look the other way when people put money in front of our noses. We have to look at the other things we can see so the money doesn't hide them.

Portraiture has its risks, and I suppose a dissident Free Presbyterian fatwa is one of them.

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.

Late people do not altogether leave us, she thought; they are still with us in memories such as that, wherever we are, no matter what time of day it was or how we were feeling, they were there, still shining the light of their love upon us.

Words can make big things little, you know.

She had always worked as hard as she could, at everything she did, and she simply did not understand how anybody could do otherwise. How could they sit there, as they did, and stare into the space in front of their desks when they could be adding up figures or checking the drivers' returns?

There were two classes of persons upon whom a duty of virtually absolute confidentiality rested: doctors and lovers.

Which is how most people acted when it came to temptation. They gave in. And we should never forget, thought Isabel, that every one of us is capable of doing the same thing if the game that we see for ourselves is large enough.

We need a person whom we can make our little god on this earth, as the old Kgatla saying had it. Whether it was a spouse, or a child, or a parent, or anybody else for that matter, there must be somebody who gives our lives purpose.

People who do that sort of thing may reap what they sow, but they also destroy the harvest of those who are around them.

It was a job that suited Stinger perfectly, as he was always happy when snarling, and snarling at sharks is as snarly a job as anyone can imagine. Of course it was possible that one day he might meet a shark who wasn't frightened of him, but then that's another story, and no job can be perfect in all respects.

Some knowledge is a fish," she muttered. "Some is a serpent.

I would never inflict my bassoon on anybody really other than the long suffering audiences that come to the concerts of The Really Terrible Orchestra; which actually is really terrible.

There is plenty of work for love to do.

It seemed an odd thing to say, and yet all of us had a view from somewhere, a view of the world from the perspective of who we were, of what had happened to us, of how we thought about things.

By comparison with such lives, our days were inconsequential indeed, and yet even though our canvas was small, still we could paint a masterpiece - as long as we were content for it to be a miniature.

The people too seemed diminished. Her favourite aunt was still her favourite, of course, but whereas she had always been impressed by the wisdom of what her aunt said, now her words seemed no more than trite. And what was worse, she had actually felt embarrassed at some of her pronouncements, thinking that such observations would seem quaint in Gaborone. That had made her feel guilty, and she had tried to smile appreciatively at her aunt's remarks, but somehow the effort seemed too great. She knew this was wrong; she knew that you should never forget what you owed to home, and to family, and to the place that nurtured you, but sometimes it was difficult to put this into practice.

All our human endeavours are like that, she reflected, and it is only because we are too ignorant to realize it, or are too forgetful to remember it, that we have the confidence to build something that is meant to last.

Let's not have a sniffle, let's have a jolly good cry And always remember, the longer you live, the sooner you jolly well die.

If people have ghosts, then why shouldn't other things have them? What makes us so special that only we can have ghosts?

Everything is possible in love. In the heart of each of us there can be many rooms, and sometimes there are.

...Pat wondered what inspiration an artist might find in the attempts of twenty-first-century architects to impose their phallic triumphs on the cityscape. Had any artist ever painted a contemporary glass block, for instance, or any other product of architectural brutalism that had laid its crude hands here and there upon the city?...If a building did not lend itself to being painted, then surely that must be because it was inherently ugly, whatever its claims to utility. And if it was ugly, then what was it doing in this delicately beautiful city?

That, incidentally, gives me the greatest possible pleasure - the knowledge that we are all linked by our friendship with a group of fictional people. What a pleasant club of which to be a member! [from the preface; on writing for people around the world]

How do you calibrate pain?" asked Jamie. "By cutting out the background pain of the world," answered Isabel. "By cutting all that out, not registering it, and responding only to those painful things that we can do something about. Because otherwise ...

To lose a child ... was something that could end one's world. One could never get back to how it was before. The stars went out. The moon disappeared. The birds became silent.

There once was a woman name of Sil,
Who inserted a lit dynamite stick for a thrill.
They found her vagina in North Carolina-
And bits of her tits in Brazil.

The young rarely believe that they will not be able to get what they want, because there is always an open future.

... photographs on a wall were there for people to see and to examine if interested; an album is a different thing ...

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.

The point of opera is that people are moved by the emotions and music.

Be content with who you are and where you are, and do whatever you can do to bring to others such contentment, and joy, and understanding that you have managed to find yourself.

Everybody in a village had a role to play in bringing up a child - and cherishing it - and in return that child would in due course feel responsible for everybody in that village. That is what makes life in society possible. We must love one another and help one another in our daily lives. That was the traditional African way and there was no substitute for it. None.

Mma Ramotswe found it difficult to imagine what it would be like to have no people. There were, she knew, those who had no others in this life, who had no uncles, or aunts, or distant cousins of any degree; people who were just themselves. Many white people were like that, for some unfathomable reason; they did not seem to want to have people and were happy to be just themselves. How lonely they must be
like spacemen deep in space, floating in darkness, but without even that silver, unfurling cord that linked the astronauts to their little metal womb of oxygen and warmth. For a moment, she indulged the metaphor, and imagined the tiny white van in space, slowly spinning against a background of stars and she, Mma Ramotswe, of the No. 1 Ladies' Space Agency, floating weightless, head over heels, tied to the tiny white van with a thin washing line.

As they left the shop, Mma Ramotswe made amends and told Mma Makutsi that she really thought the blue shoes very beautiful. There was no point in disapproving of a purchase once the deed had been done.

Out in Saxe-Coburg Street she stood still for a moment and looked at the gardens. He kissed me, she thought. He made the move; I didn't. The thought was an overwhelming one and invested the everyday world about her, the world of the square, of trees, of people walking by, with a curious glow, a chiaroscuro which made everything precious. It was the feeling, she imagined, that one had when one vouchsafed a vision. Everything is changed, becomes more blessed, making the humblest of surroundings a holy place.

She brought a chair into the room and placed it alongside the top of his bed. Then she held his hand as he drifted off to sleep. It was so small in her own hand, and it felt warm and dry. She pressed his hand gently, and his fingers returned the pressure, but only just, as he was almost asleep by then. She remembered, but not very well, what it was to fall asleep holding the hand of another; how precious such an experience, how fortunate those to whom it was vouchsafed by the gods of Friendship, or of Love. She thought she had forgotten that, but now she remembered.

Mma Ramotswe had listened to a World Service broadcast on her radio one day which had simply taken her breath away. It was about philosophers who called themselves existentialists and who, as far as Mma Ramotswe could ascertain, lived in France. These French people said that you should just live in a way which made you feel real, and that the real thing to do was the right thing too. Mma Ramotswe had listened in astonishment. You did not have to go to France to meet existentialists, she reflected; there were many existentialists right here in Botswana. Note Mokoti, for example. She had been married to an existentialist herself, without even knowing it. Note, that selfish man who never once put himself out for another--not even for his wife--would have approved of existentialists, and they of him. It was very existentialist, perhaps, to go out to bars every night while your pregnant wife stayed at home, and even more existentialist to go off with girls--young existentialist girls--you met in bars. It was a good life being an existentialist, although not too good for all the other, nonexistentialist people around one.

His life was unrecorded; who is there to write down the lives of ordinary people?

Mr Mandela, who had given his whole life for justice and had never once thought of himself. How unlike these people were modern politicians, who thought only of power and tricks.

When there is nothing you can do to stop the march of adverse events, then the best thing, she felt, was to get on with life and not to worry.

You can't go through life saying "I hate mustard" because that is shutting off the possibility of change.

Mma Ramotswe had been understanding. Men who sired children and then failed to accept responsibility for them were anathema to her, and she reserved particular disapproval for those who then completely disappeared. She

There were few other passengers: a man in an overcoat, his head sunk against his chest; a couple with arms around each other, impervious to their surroundings; and a teenage boy with a black scarf wound round his neck, Zorro-style. Isabel smiled to herself: a microcosm of our condition, she thought. Loneliness and despair; love and its self-absorption; and sixteen, which was a state all its own.

You're always told by your publisher that you must only write one book a year and some years you should perhaps write none at all.

So it was perfectly possible that there were men who liked shopping, men who understood exactly what it was all about, but Mma Ramotwe had yet to meet such a man. Maybe they existed elsewhere - in France, perhaps - but they did not seem to be much in evidence in Botswana.

Bertie stared at his mother. She spoils things, he thought. All she ever does is spoil things.
He had not started this conversation, and it was not his fault that they were now talking about Grey Owl. He sounded rather a nice man to Bertie. Any why should he not dress up in feathers and live in the forests if that was what he wanted to do? It was typical of his mother to try to spoil Grey Owl's fun.

On the wall of this yard there was the wording, painted in high letters: Reliable Autos. We get you there.
"Get you where?" asked Fanwell. Chobie smiled. "Where you want to get. That's where everybody's heading, after all. To where they want to get.

Love had transformed the world for me. Transformed it.

It was all a question of face, she decided: you had to leave room for face to be saved.

It's really rather easy to write eighth-century Chinese poetry," said Angus Lordie. "In English, of course. It requires little effort, I find.

... 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.

We shall change all that ... because it is possible to change the world, if one is determined enough, and if one sees with sufficient clarity just what has to be changed.

It would be wonderful to have a guru; it would be like having a social worker or a personal trainer, not that people who had either of these necessarily appreciated the advice they received.

Do not be ashamed to cry, Rra," said Mma Ramotswe. "It is the way that things begin to get better. It is the first step.

forgiveness of others allows us to adjust our feelings towards the past, assuages our anger. Our

Substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive into adult years. Those are the ones in which we are bound to one

Barbara said to herself: Oh, please, please, please! Please let nothing go wrong with this - this wildly improbable, impossible, but gorgeous thing. She was not sure to whom to address this invocation. To Venus, perhaps? If the goddess of love were listening, she would surely cherish such an invocation and understand the urgency, the yearning, that lay behind it.

There are awkward moments from which one can retreat, and awkward moments from which there is no escape.

None of us, she thought, wants the world we know to come to an end; we do not want familiar things to be taken from us.

They paid the deposit immediately and appeared to be good tenants although they were reluctant to invite him over the threshold once they had moved in. "There is no need for you to come in," he had been told by a burly Russian who answered the door when he had called to see whether all was well. "There is nothing wrong. Everything functions. We are very happy. Goodbye.

Thinking about somebody every day of his life ... oh yes, he said to himself. Oh yes, you do. You think about somebody. He fills your world. He is all about you, a presence, and you think about him; you can't help it, because he's always there, in your thoughts. But you know, of course, that all the while you're thinking about him, he's not thinking about you. That's the hardest thing about it. That's what makes it so very, very hard to bear. So hard that sometimes you just sit there and let the misery wash over you; the misery, the emptiness.

Go badly wrong. Sex, she thought. That is what is going to go wrong here. And she was right. "This woman," Mma Gabane Gabane went on, "this foolish, foolish woman met a young man who worked in the same office. He wasn't an accountant - nothing like that - he was a trainee, Mma Ramotswe, just a trainee. He was eighteen." There was a sharp intake of breath from Mma Phumele, who looked at Mma Ramotswe to gauge her reaction. She would be every bit as shocked as the rest of them, she imagined. And Mma Ramotswe was shocked.

A traditional house smelled of wood smoke, the earth, and of thatch; all good smells, the smell of life itself.

I told him that if a man is born in a dry place, then although he may dream of rain, he does not want too much, and that he will not mind the sun that beats down and down.

You know the best example of sincerity? The absolute gold standard?
Who?
Angus pointed to the door, outside which Cyril was waiting patiently. A dog. Have you ever met an insincere dog - a dog who hides his true feelings?
Domenica looked thoughtful.
And cats?
Dreadfully insincere, said Angus. Psychopaths- every one of them. Show me a cat, Domenica, and I'll show you a psychopath. Textbook examples.

Chance; pure chance. But chance was a dull explanation because it denied the possibility of the paranormal, and people were often disappointed by dull explanations. Mystery and the unknown were far more exciting because they suggested that our world was not quite as prosaic as we feared it might be. Yet we had to adjure those temptations because they lead to a world of darkness and fear.

Sometimes I go blind. Then I take my right hand out to dinner.

steamships insult the dignity of distance,

Those important brain circuits, the ones that enabled most of us to avoid saying the wrong thing, were simply not there in Martha's case; or fired in the wrong order; or were short-circuiting. In other words, Martha Drummond was an electrical problem. And understanding people as electrical problems undoubtedly helped one to tolerate them.

Remember that, she said to herself; remember that in your dealings with others - they may be dying.

I am grateful to you for being who you are: for standing up for ladies with large glasses and a bad skin and for everybody else who has had to battle to get where they have got. And most of all I am grateful to you for being my friend, Mma; I am grateful to you for that. That is the best thing that anybody can be to anybody else--a friend.

People don't talk about mercy very much these days - it has a rather old-fashioned ring to it. but it exists and its power is quite extraordinary

Remember the Hottentots?" asked James. "They've become the Khoi now, which means that the Germans will have to retire that wonderful word of theirs, Hottentotenpotentatenstantenattentater, which means, as you know, one who attacks the aunt of a Hottentot potentate.

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

she imagined what it would be like to live with somebody who had secrets. Instead of a comfortable atmosphere of trust there would be a nagging insecurity, like a corrosive crust, eating away at the fabric of the marriage. Doubts would spread like weeds, making it impossible to relax, spoiling everything.

Perhaps one day she would find a place where she would stay. That would be good. To know that the place you were in was your own place - where you should be.

We needed resentment, he said, as it was resentment which identified and underlined the wrong. Without these reactive attitudes, we ran the risk of diminishing our sense of right and wrong, because we could end up thinking it just doesn't matter.

To dispatch one's friends to a dictionary from time to time is one of the more sophisticated pleasures of life, but it is one that must be indulged in sparingly: to do it too often may result in accusations of having swallowed one's own dictionary, which is not a compliment, whichever way one looks at it.