603 Quotes by 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.

Irene gasped. "Have you taken leave of your senses, Stuart?" she hissed. "Have you?"Stuart closed his eyes."No," he said. "Au contraire." It was strong language for the Edinburgh New Town, but he had to say it."Don't au contraire me," said Irene.But it was too late. He had.

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

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.

It is such an easy thing to do—to touch another in sympathy—but it is such a hard thing too.

Cover hatred and fear with love and delight, and with innocent things...The proponents of confrontation, violence, the acerbic comment, laughed at the innocent things, thought them naive, considered them beneath them. How easy it was to destroy the civilised structures of the world; how easy to poison the wells.

He is a good, kind man,” said Mma Potokwane. “And such men are often too busy. I have noticed that round here too. That man I was talking to just then—one of our groundsmen—he is like that. He is so kind that everybody asks him to do everything. We had a bad-tempered man working here once and he had nothing to do because nobody, apart form myself, of course, had the courage to ask him to do anything.

...it must be odd to have no ambition, not to want something more.

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.