Alexander McCall Smith Quotes

This was a townscape raised in the teeth of cold winds from the east; a city of winding cobbled streets and haughty pillars; a city of dark nights and candlelight, and intellect.
Alexander McCall Smith
…did it make a difference if the remark never got back to the person about whom it was made? She thought not. The harm is done when the words are uttered: that is the act of belittlement, the act of diminishing the other, and it is that act which would cause pain to the victim. You said that about me? The wrong was located in the making of the cruel remark, rather than in the pain it might later cause.
Alexander McCall Smith
…one of those dreadful boarding schools. It was down on the South Coast. I think some very unpleasant things happened there…. So many lives were distorted by such cruelty. I know so many men who had to put up with that, so many….
Alexander McCall Smith
Dieting was cruel; it was an abuse of human rights. Yes, that's what it was, and she should not allow herself to be manipulated in this way. She stopped herself. Thinking like that was nothing more than coming up with excuses for breaking the diet. Mma Ramotswe was made of sterner stuff than that, and so she persisted.
Alexander McCall Smith
I shall go and sit under a tree…. Which tree, Mma?... Oh, there are many trees in this life, she said. It does not matter which tree you choose, as long as you choose the right one.
Alexander McCall Smith
And then the second thing you have to do is go and see your son. That is a duty of love, Andrew. It's as simple as that. A duty of love. Do you understand what I'm saying to you?
Alexander McCall Smith
Tolerance was like one of those soothing creams—it drew out inflammation, it did away with the pain.
Alexander McCall Smith
It was easy to make a difference to other people’s lives, so easy to change the little room in which people lived their life.
Alexander McCall Smith
Anybody can lose,' cautioned Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. 'You need to remember that every time you win.
Alexander McCall Smith
How often have I noticed or, indeed, listened to him? We talk, but do I actually listen, or is our conversation mainly a question of my waiting for him to stop and for it to be my turn to say something? For how many of us is that what conversation means - the setting up of our lines?
Alexander McCall Smith
Africa was full of people in need of help and there had to be a limit. You simply could not help everybody; but you could at least help those who came into your life. That principle allowed you to deal with the suffering you saw. That was your suffering. Other people would have to deal with the suffering that they, in their turn, came across.
Alexander McCall Smith
They sang that song which distills all the suffering and the hope of Africa; that song which had inspired and comforted so many, “Nkosi Sikeleli Afrika,” God Bless Africa, give her life, watch over her children.
Alexander McCall Smith
She believed in getting as much use as possible from everything, and thought that as long as machinery, or anything else, could be cajoled into operation, it should be kept; to do otherwise, she thought, was wasteful.
Alexander McCall Smith
It was hard to disappear completely in Botswana, where there were fewer than two million people and where people had a healthy curiosity as to who was who and where people had come from. It was very difficult to be anonymous, even in Gaborone, as there would always be neighbours who would want to know exactly what one was doing and who one’s people had been.
Alexander McCall Smith
The only thing that makes me sad is that I shall be leaving Africa when I die. I love Africa, which is my mother and my father. When I am dead, I shall miss the smell of Africa
Alexander McCall Smith
Africa had a way of coming back and simply covering everything up again.
Alexander McCall Smith
Everything, all those great things, had happened so far away--or so it seemed to [Mma Ramotswe] at the time. The world was made to sound as if it belonged to other people--to those who lived in distant countries that were so different from Botswana; that was before people had learned to assert that the world was theirs too, that what happened in Botswana was every bit as important, and valuable, as what happened anywhere else.
Alexander McCall Smith
And if there's bad behaviour," Mma Potokwane went on. "If there's bad behaviour, the quickest way of stopping it is to give more love. That always works, you know. People say we must punish when there is wrongdoing, but if you punish you're only punishing yourself. And what's the point of that?
Alexander McCall Smith
However she redefined herself, that part of one that made for the core of the self, that part that we think of as the ultimate, inner being—that was ineradicable Scottish. That part spoke with a Scottish voice; that part looked out through Scottish eyes; and it was that part that now welled within her as she gazed out through the window of the descending plane and saw below her the rolling Borders hills…
Alexander McCall Smith
Our stomachs live in towns," said Mma Potokwani, patting the front of her dress. 'That is where the work is. Our stomachs know that. But our hearts are usually somewhere else.
Alexander McCall Smith
... 'You can't read everything. I've never got beyond the beginning of Proust. I love him, but I can't seem to get beyond about page three.'They were comfortable in each other's company, and this confession seemed to accentuate the ease of their relationship. The confession itself was not entirely true; Isabel had read more Proust than that, but other people undoubtedly found it reassuring to think that one had only read a few pages. Certainly those who claimed to have read Proust in his entirety got scant sympathy from others. And yet, she suddenly wondered, should you actually lie about how much Proust you've read? Some politicians, she reminded herself, did that--or the equivalent--when they claimed to be down-to-earth, no-nonsense types, just like the voters, when all the time they were secretly delighting in Proust . . .
Alexander McCall Smith
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.
Alexander McCall Smith
The previously unloved may find it hard to believe that they are now loved; that is such a miracle, they feel; such a miracle.
Alexander McCall Smith
...and with it would come that wonderful, unmistakable smell of rain, that smell of dust and water meeting that lingered for a few seconds in the nostrils and then was gone, and would be missed, sometimes for months, before the next time that it caught you and made you stop and say to the person with you, any person: That is the smell of rain, there, right now.
Alexander McCall Smith
...the real poison within families is not the poison that you put in your food, but the poison that grows up in the heart when people are jealous of one another and cannot speak these feelings and drain out the poison that way.
Alexander McCall Smith
That of all people, it should be him; that took her aback. That the heart should settle on somebody like him; that surprised her. But she was so certain about it, so certain.
Alexander McCall Smith
Shall I make you a cup of tea? He asked. It was the classic response to crisis practiced throughout these islands—in England, Scotland, and elsewhere. Emotional turmoil, danger, even disaster could be faced with far greater equanimity if the kettle was switched on. War has been declared! There’s been a major earthquake! The stock market has collapsed! Oh really? Let me put the kettle on….
Alexander McCall Smith
She was of traditional build herself, but her figure was largely concealed by the folds of a generously cut shift dress made out of a flecked green fabric. It was like a tent, thought Mma Ramotswe--a camouflage tent of the sort that the Botswana Defence Force might use. But I do not sit in judgement on the dresses of others, she told herself, and a tent was a practical enough garment, if that is what one felt comfortable in.
Alexander McCall Smith
That was the trouble with people in general: they were surprisingly unrealistic in their expectations.
Alexander McCall Smith
She had not come to the shopping centre to buy shoes; she had come to buy food, and there was a big difference between shopping for food and shopping for shoes, and that difference concentrated on one word: guilt.
Alexander McCall Smith
It was curious how some people had a highly developed sense of guilt, she thought, while others had none.
Alexander McCall Smith
The trouble with Grace, she thought, is that she is so literal. But that was the trouble with most people, when it came down to it; there were very few who enjoyed flights of fantasy, and to have that sort of mind--one which enjoyed dry with and understood the absurd--left one in a shrinking minority.
Alexander McCall Smith
It is hard, she thought, it is hard for us to think of people who dislike us because none of us, in our heart, believes that we deserve the hatred of others.
Alexander McCall Smith
So it was in Botswana, almost everywhere; ties of kinship, no matter how attenuated by distance or time, linked one person to another, weaving across the country a human blanket of love and community. And in the fibres of that blanket there were threads of obligation that meant that one could not ignore the claims of others. Nobody should starve; nobody should feel that they were outsiders; nobody should be alone in their sadness.
Alexander McCall Smith
There were some people, it seemed, who were incapable of being pleasant about anything. Of course, the cars that such people drove tended to be difficult as well. Nice cars have nice drivers; bad cars have bad drivers. A person's gearbox revealed everything that you could want to know about that person, thought Mr J.L.B. Matekoni.
Alexander McCall Smith
...it must be odd to have no ambition, not to want something more.
Alexander McCall Smith
Of course, the abolition of Hell meant that such thoughts were now the merest fantasy. Isobel was agnostic as to what, if anything, lay in store for us after this life; that there was a world of spirit seemed to her to be a possibility that we should not exclude. Consciousness was an elusive entity about which we knew very little, other than that it came into existence when certain conditions were present- a sufficient mass of brain cells operating in a particular way. But could we really say much more than that about where it was located & whether it could survive in other conditions? The fact that a plant grew in one place did not mean that it could not grow in another. And if something lay behind this consciousness, orchestrated it & and the conditions that produced it, then why should we not call this something God?
Alexander McCall Smith
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.
Alexander McCall Smith
Antonia was very conscious of the corrosive power of envy and felt that it was this emotion, more than any other, which lay behind human unhappiness. People did not realise how widespread envy was.
Alexander McCall Smith
The house seemed so different at night. Everything was in its correct place, of course, but somehow the furniture seemed more angular and the pictures on the wall more one-dimensional. She remembered somebody saying that at night we are all strangers, even to ourselves, and this struck her as being true.
Alexander McCall Smith
There was a great deal of progress being made, right under their noses, particularly in Africa, and this progress was good. Life was much harder for tyrants than it had been before.
Alexander McCall Smith
His sixth year, it seemed to him, had lasted a remarkably long time and there were points at which he frankly wondered whether he would ever turn seven. But now it was the night before his birthday, and barring some cosmic disaster, the advent of some unexpected black hole into which the earth might be sucked, with the attendant reversal or suspension of time, in very few hours he would be waking up to a world in which he was numbered among the seven-year-olds.
Alexander McCall Smith
…there is faith and faith. One form of faith is actual practice—the rituals and so on—the other form of faith involves actually believing in it.
Alexander McCall Smith
It was always the best way of finding out information; just go and ask a woman who keeps her eyes and ears open and who likes to talk. It always worked. It was no use asking men; they simply were not interested enough in other people and the ordinary doings of people. That is why the real historians of Africa had always been the grandmothers, who remembered the lineage and the stories that went with it.
Alexander McCall Smith
And if you do see any pirates, I don't want you to pick up any rough manners from them. Do you understand?
Alexander McCall Smith
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.
Alexander McCall Smith
...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.
Alexander McCall Smith
What we have, we all must lose—that applied to everything, even to that which we thought we had the greatest right. We were tenants of this earth—nothing more.
Alexander McCall Smith
we must love those with whom we live and work, and love them for all their failings, manifest and manifold though they be.
Alexander McCall Smith
In an earlier age, it might have been possible to believe that goodness would prevail over pride, but not anymore. The proud could be proud with impunity, because there was nobody to contradict him in his pride and because narcissism was no longer considered a vice. That was what the whole cult of celebrity was about, she thought; and we fêted these people and fed their vanity.
Alexander McCall Smith
We chose younger and younger politicians to lead us because they looked good on television and were sharp. But really we should be looking for wisdom, and choosing people who had acquired it; and such people, in general, looked bad on television - gray, lined, thoughtful.
Alexander McCall Smith
I said to him that Zululand sounded fine, but that every man has a map in his heart of his own country and that the heart will never allow you to forget this map.
Alexander McCall Smith
A traditional house smelled of wood smoke, the earth, and of thatch; all good smells, the smell of life itself.
Alexander McCall Smith
He would sit down and consider the situation carefully. Not only did this help to identify the solution to the problem, but it also gave him the opportunity to remind himself that things were not really as bad as they seemed; it was all a question of perspective. Sitting down and looking up at the sky for a few minutes--not at any particular part of the sky, but just at the sky in general--at the vast, dizzying, empty sky of Botswana, cut human problems down to size.
Alexander McCall Smith
It is so easy to thank people," said Mma Ramotswe, passing the letter over to Mma Makutsi, "and most people don't bother to do it. They don't thank the person who does something for them. They just take it for granted.
Alexander McCall Smith
It was a stark choice: shoes or food; beauty or sustenance; the sensible or the self-indulgent. "I'll take the shoes," she said firmly.
Alexander McCall Smith
A photograph may speak to the photographer's envy or disappointment just as much as it may reveal his anger or disapproval. And even if a photograph records a joyous occasion, behind it there may still be more than a small measure of heartbreak on the part of the photographer. A small measure of heartbreak? One might think such a thing is impossible--if your heart is broken, then surely it is broken completely. Yet the truth is that we can live with a minor fault-line in the heart--most of us do, in one way or another.
Alexander McCall Smith
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.
Alexander McCall Smith
There is a tidal wave of ignorance, Mma Ramotswe. It is a great tidal wave and it will drown all of us if we are not careful.
Alexander McCall Smith
Morality is for everybody, and this means that the views of more than one person are needed to create it. That was what made the modern morality, with its emphasis on individuals and the working out of an individual position, so weak. If you gave people the chance to work out their morality, then they would work out the version which was easiest for them and which allowed them to do what suited them for as much of the time as possible. That, in Mma Ramotswe's view, was simple selfishness, whatever grand name one gave to it.
Alexander McCall Smith