603 Quotes by Alexander McCall Smith

Lou knew that joy unshared was a halved emotion, just as sadness and loss, when borne alone, were often doubled.

The people with the strong, brave exteriors are just as weak and vulnerable as the rest of us. And of course they never admit to their childish practices, their moments of weakness or absurdity, and then the rest of us think that's how it should be.

Simple questions--and simple answers--were what we needed in life. That was what Mma Ramotswe believed. Yes.

At night we are all strangers, even to ourselves.

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.

I’ve always had a creative urge and I get immense satisfaction from creating something because it feels like I’m making sense of the world and imposing order on it.

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?

You can go through life and make new friends every year – every month practically – but there was never any substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive into adult years. Those are the ones in which we are bound to one another with hoops of steel.

Stand on your toe. That is what one said in Setswana if one hoped that something would happen. It was the same as the expression which white people used: cross your fingers.