603 Quotes by Alexander McCall Smith

... i cuori degli uomini che sono molto lontani dal loro Paese sono pieni di tristezze.

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

Africa had a way of coming back and simply covering everything up again.

The ordinary people of Africa tended not to have room in their hearts for hatred. They were sometimes foolish, like people anywhere, but they did not bear grudges, as Mr Mandela had shown the world.

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.

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.

She could turn away and say that they had nothing to do with her, or she could accept that they had somehow touched her skirt. ...we all had a skirt, and those who touched our skirt became our concern.

People’s lives are delicate; you cannot interfere with them without running the risk of changing them profoundly. A chance remark, a careless involvement, may make the difference between a life of happiness and one of sorrow

bureaucracy was very rarely an obstruction, provided that one applied to it the insights of ordinary, everyday psychology