603 Quotes by Alexander McCall Smith

There are some very inventive adults, Mma. When you listen to them, you have to divide everything they say by two, and then take away ten. As you have to do with some politicians.

I enjoy women’s conversation, and I think that helps me to describe them in fiction.

A flaky skin was particularly bad if you were a criminal, she had read, as it meant that you left a great deal of DNA at the scene of the crime. That had amused her. That would teach any flaky-skinned housebreakers to burgle people’s houses. “You really need to do something about your skin,” the police might say to such people when they arrested them.

It is the onion, memory, that makes me cry,” he said.

There are so many ways of falling off the high moral ground you’ve carefully built up for yourself. Moral ground is like that – slippery at the edges.

We are human and vulnerable, whatever our individual situation: The moon looks on them all The Healers and the brilliant talkers The eccentrics and the silent walkers The dumpy and the tall.

Lions walk on four legs,” observed Mma Makutsi. “Was this man walking on four legs? That can be a big giveaway, Mma.

She was tuned in to a different station from most people and the tuning dial was broken.

I’m saying that forgiveness is like the rain. That’s all I’m saying. It makes things better. Rain does that too.