603 Quotes by Alexander McCall Smith

You have to leave your heart to get on with it. It’s rather like breathing. We don’t have to remind ourselves to breathe.

Although she was not a great reader, Mma Potokwane was a firm believer in the power of the book. The more books that Botswana had, in her view, the better. It would be on books that the future would be based; books and the people who knew how to use them.

The trouble with Grace, she thought, is that she is so literal. But that was the trouble with most people, when it came down to it; there were very few who enjoyed flights of fantasy, and to have that sort of mind – one which enjoyed dry with and understood the absurd – left one in a shrinking minority.

If more women were in power, they wouldn’t let wars break out,” she said. “Women can’t be bothered with all this fighting. We see war for what it is- a matter of broken bodies and crying mothers.

To be able to imagine the ohter, and the experience of the other was what wisdome was all about; but nobody talked about wisdom very much anymore, nor virtue perhaps because wisdom was nto appreciated in a world of glitz and effect.

Brother Fox looked in. He saw two people. He saw them raise their glasses of wine to him, liquid that for him was suspended in the air, as if by a miracle.

The husband should say to the reverend: ‘And I promise not to defy my wife.

Sometimes it was difficult to be as tolerant as he wanted to be; but then, thought Ulf, the whole point about high ideals is that they are high. Being Swedish was not always easy, but you had to do your best, and hope that you didn’t slip, and become... well, Mediterranean in outlook.

Everybody was a potential assailant; nobody spoke to one another for fear of being misinterpreted; nobody comforted another, put an arm around a shoulder-to do so would be to invite accusation.