603 Quotes by Alexander McCall Smith

Daughters could survive a powerful mother, but boys found it almost impossible. Such boys were often severely damaged and spent the rest of their lives running away from their mothers, or from anybody who remotely reminded them of their mothers; either that, or they became their mothers, in a desperate, misguided act of psychological self defence.

Do not take on a traditionally built person unless you are prepared for a heavyweight bout.

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.

We are all tempted, Mma. We are all tempted when it comes to cake.

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.

A life without stories would be no life at all. And stories bound us, did they not, one to another, the living to the dead, people to animals, people to the land?

I am just a tiny person in Africa, but there is a place for me, and for everybody, to sit down on this earth and touch it and call it their own.

I have always taken the view that one should never hold against a man anything he says after twelve o'clock at night or after a glass or two of anything.

Dogs are in on our human silliness; lions are not.