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Top Alexander McCall Smith Quotes

Browse top 208 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Alexander McCall Smith.

Favorite Alexander McCall Smith Quotes

1. "There was a teapot, in which Mma Ramotswe -- the only lady private detective in Botwana -- brewed tea. And three mugs -- one for herself, one for her secretary, and one for the client. What else does a detective agency really need?" ~ Alexander McCall Smith
2. "this was a consequence of increasing prosperity, which, curiously enough, just seemed to bring out greed and selfishness." ~ Alexander McCall Smith
3. "What is beauty, she thought, but the promise of happiness, as Stendhal said it was?" ~ Alexander McCall Smith
4. "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." ~ Alexander McCall Smith
5. "Perhaps her shoes would say something; Mma Makutsi had told her once, jokingly— and she must have been joking— told her that her shoes occasionally gave her advice. Well, perhaps they could tell her not to be so bossy. They must have witnessed it after all— shoes see everything; there are no secrets we can keep from our shoes." ~ Alexander McCall Smith
6. "You are a lucky lady to be marrying a man who can fix things. Most husbands just break things." ~ Alexander McCall Smith
7. "How many of us are happy to be exactly where we are at any moment?...only the completely happy think that they are in the correct place." ~ Alexander McCall Smith
8. "We act out our lives to a soundtrack, thought Isabel, the music that becomes, for a spell, out favourite and is listened to again and again until it stands for the time itself. But that was about all the scripting that we achieved; the rest, for most of us, was extemporising." ~ Alexander McCall Smith
9. "We do not like those who are completely available, who make themselves over to us entirely. They crowd us out. They make us feel uneasy." ~ Alexander McCall Smith
10. "They passed the rest of the journey in silence, not because of any awkwardness, but because neither wished conversation to break the spell that the unfolding Highland landscape was weaving about them. And what remarks were needed here? If one listens to the talk of people looking at scenes of great natural beauty, their words are often revealing. "Isn't it beautiful?" is what is most frequently said; to which the reply, ‘Yes, beautiful," adds little. What is happening, of course, is a sharing. We wish to share beauty as if it were a discovery; but one can share in silence, and perhaps the sharing is all the more powerful for it." ~ Alexander McCall Smith
11. "Distant wrongs, she thought: an interesting issue in moral philosophy. Do past wrongs seem less wrong to us simply because they are less vivid?" ~ Alexander McCall Smith
12. "None of us is immune to shipwreck. Come, beckons the fatal shore: come and die on my white sands, it said. And we do." ~ Alexander McCall Smith
13. "I'd like to be tidy, said Hen, I try, but I guess you can't be what you aren't." ~ Alexander McCall Smith
14. "Simple questions--and simple answers--were what we needed in life. That was what Mma Ramotswe believed. Yes." ~ Alexander McCall Smith
15. "Matthew knew that phrenology was nonsense, and yet, years later, he found himself making judgments similar to those made by his father; slippery people looked slippery; they really did. And how we become like our parents! How their scorned advice - based, we felt in our superiority, on prejudiced and muddled folk wisdom - how their opinions are subsequently borne out by our own discoveries and sense of the world, one after one. And as this happens, we realise with increasing horror that proposition which we would never have entertained before: our mothers were right!" ~ Alexander McCall Smith
16. "And food made with love, she thought, tasted better-everybody knew that. It just did." ~ Alexander McCall Smith
17. "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." ~ Alexander McCall Smith
18. "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
19. "And that is why we must answer her hatred with love. I can't say whether it will change her in her heart - it probably won't. But if it makes her feel even just a little bit better about herself, she will be less envious." ~ Alexander McCall Smith
20. "...She was, in fact, often wrong--and knew it. Life became difficult when those who were often wrong did not know it." ~ Alexander McCall Smith
21. "For a short while she considered the idea of orchestral courtesy. Certainly one should avoid giving political offence: German orchestras, of course, used to be careful about playing Wagner abroad, at least in some countries, choosing instead German composers who were somewhat more ... apologetic." ~ Alexander McCall Smith
22. "It's really rather easy to write eighth-century Chinese poetry," said Angus Lordie. "In English, of course. It requires little effort, I find." ~ Alexander McCall Smith
23. "One of the most destructive things that's happening in modern society is that we are losing our sense of the bonds that bind people together - which can lead to nightmares of social collapse." ~ Alexander McCall Smith
24. "I am capable of being idle." ~ Alexander McCall Smith
25. "That my philosophy of life is, as far as possible, one of enjoyment. I'm not nihilistic." ~ Alexander McCall Smith
26. "I write four books a year. I'm very fortunate that I write quickly; around 3,500 words a day. Being strict about delineating my writing time and personal life, as well as keeping distractions at bay, is the only way I can accomplish this." ~ Alexander McCall Smith
27. "So the small things came into their own: small acts of helping others, if one could; small ways of making one's own life better: acts of love, acts of tea, acts of laughter. Clever people might laugh at such simplicity, but, she asked herself, what was their own solution?" ~ Alexander McCall Smith
28. "It is the search for beauty...That is what it is. We find ourselves on this earth--gods and men--and we know that it is beautiful. That is one of the few things we understand--beauty; because it is there, in the world, and we can see it all about us. We want beauty. It requires our love. It just does." ~ Alexander McCall Smith
29. "It was time to take the pumpkin out of the pot and eat it. In the final analysis, that was what solved these big problems of life. You could think and think and get nowhere, but you still had to eat your pumpkin. That brought you down to earth. That gave you a reason for going on. Pumpkin." ~ Alexander McCall Smith
30. "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
31. "We all know that it is women who make the decisions, but we have to let men think that the decisions are theirs. It is an act of kindness on the part of women." ~ Alexander McCall Smith
32. "She had a taste for sugar, however, and this meant that a doughnut or a cake might follow the sandwich. She was a traditionally built lady, after all, and she did not have to worry about dress size, unlike those poor, neurotic people who were always looking in mirrors and thinking that they were too big. What was too big, anyway? Who was to tell another person what size they should be? It was a form of dictatorship, by the thin, and she was not having any of it. If these thin people became any more insistent, then the more generously sized people would just have to sit on them. Yes, that would teach them! Hah!" ~ Alexander McCall Smith
33. "But don't we often lie to people we love, or not tell them things, precisely because we love them?" ~ Alexander McCall Smith
34. "...how sorry she felt for white people, who couldn't do any of this (sit talking with friends and growing melons) and who were always dashing around and worrying themselves over things that were going to happen anyway. What use was it having all the money if you could never sit still or just watch your cattle, and yet they did not know it. Every so often you met a white person who understood, who realized how things really were; but these people were few and far between and the other white people often treated them with suspicion." ~ Alexander McCall Smith
35. "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
36. "Do you realise that people die of boredom in London suburbs? It's the second biggest cause of death amongs the English in general. Sheer boredom..." ~ Alexander McCall Smith
37. "Men are very sensitive, Mma Makutsi. You would not always think it to look at them, but they are. They do not like you to point out that they are wrong, even when they are. That is the way things are, Mma--it just is." ~ Alexander McCall Smith
38. "Everybody knows, she thought, that we have a skeleton underneath our skin; there's no reason to show it" ~ Alexander McCall Smith
39. "And here, she said to herself, is the victim of the witch hunt, or its modern equivalent. Not much has changed. Witchcraft or sexual harassment: the tactics of persecution were much the same - the loathed enemy was identified and then demonised." ~ Alexander McCall Smith
40. "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
41. "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
42. "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
43. "Mma Ramotswe sighed. 'We are all tempted, Mma. We are all tempted when it comes to cake.'That is true,' said Mma Potokwane sadly. 'There are many temptations in this life, but cake is probably one of the biggest of them." ~ Alexander McCall Smith
44. "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
45. "Women are the ones who knows what's going on,' she said quietly . 'They are the ones with eyes. Have you not heard of Agatha Christie?" ~ Alexander McCall Smith
46. "And the difference was this, she mused: those who are twenty don't know what it is like to be forty, whereas those who are forty know what it is like to be twenty. It was a bit like discussing a foreign country with somebody who has never been there. They are prepared to listen, but it's not quite real for them." ~ Alexander McCall Smith
47. "Love is nothing out of the ordinary, even if we think it is; even if we idealise it, celebrate it in poetry, sentimentalise it in coy valentines. Love happens to just about everyone; it is like measles or the diseases of childhood; it is as predictable as the losing of milk teeth, or the breaking of a boy's voice." ~ Alexander McCall Smith
48. "That's perfect," he said. "I'm sorry about that. It's genetic, I think. My mother had exactly the same problem, and a cousin of hers too. We're allergic to raw onion." ~ Alexander McCall Smith
49. "Music and art and philosophy are ultimately based on the premise that this man on his tractor, and these pigs, and the swarms of bees that fertilise the crops, will all continue to do what they do." ~ Alexander McCall Smith
50. "We can be confident in our dealings with the world when what the world sees is the outer person, with all the outer person's defences: the intimacy of a love affair is a different matter altogether. And who might not feel just the slightest bit insecure under the gaze of a lover--a gaze which falls on birthmarks, on blemishes physical and psychological, on our imperfections and impatience, on our human vulnerability?" ~ Alexander McCall Smith
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Everybody has to find out: who are you? What do you believe in?"
Author: Barry Manilow

What Did Alexander McCall Smith Talk About?

Thin
She
Here
Wit
Ear
Per
Thou
Hey
Hen
Though
Use
Ought
Ten
Act
Ally
Self
Con
Son
Cause
Lit
Said
King
Old
Ours
Body
Sin
Tan
Bee
Hear
Mad
End
Able
Lie
Others
Ways
Heart
Pen
Place
Sit
Sing
Felt
Ring
Perhaps
Tell
Rest
Rent
Los
Might
Yes
Often

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