603 Quotes by Alexander McCall Smith

You simply could not help everybody; but you could at least help those who came into your life.

Well, that’s the important thing, isn’t it, Mma? To feel happiness, and then to remember it.

She looked down. He had clasped his hands together, his fingers interlaced. It was a gesture, she thought, of unequivocal pleasure – pleasure at hearing what all of us wanted to hear at least occasionally: that there was somebody who liked us, whatever our faults, and liked us sufficiently to say so.

If people came at you and started to scratch you, then of course you had the right to sit on them.

Nobody is so bad that there is no chance of change.

We should all busy ourselves in being who we are, although many of us do not and spend so much time and energy being something else. We try to be what others want us to be, or what we ourselves want to be. And then we suddenly realise that our lives have shot past and we have not got round to being who we really.

Make a list of what you know, what you don’t know, and what you’d like to know. Make a list of possible outcomes. Choose the outcome you think is best, then go for that!

We needed resentment, he said, as it was resentment which identified and underlined the wrong. Without these reactive attitudes, we ran the risk of diminishing our sense of right and wrong, because we could end up thinking it just doesn’t matter.

When Emma was five, Mrs. Woodhouse died. Emma did not remember her mother. She remembered love, though, and a feeling of warmth. It was like remembering light, or the glow that sometimes persists after a light has gone out.