603 Quotes by Alexander McCall Smith

You haven’t offended me at all. You’ve made me think. That’s all.

Not all taxi drivers, Paul had discovered, actually wanted to take passengers to their destination; some of them, he felt, were in it for the arguments, or the opportunity to pontificate, or for the sheer pleasure of driving past those trying to summon them at the road edge. He made up his mind. What was the point of having a bulldozer if you were not going to make at least some use of it?

Places had echoes- and if one were sensitive, one might just pick up some resonance from the past, some feeling for what had happened.

As a child she had believed that wrongs would always be righted, that somehow the world would not let the innocent suffer, but now she realised that this was not true. Old oppressors were replaced by new ones, from another distant place or from right next door. Old lies were replaced by new ones, backed up by old threats.

I do not think this is so, because there is no difference between white men and black men; we are all the same; we are just people.

You can’t do much about a personality disorder. Cats are psychopaths at heart.

And God was here anyway, before the missionaries came. We called him by a different name, then, and he did not live over at the Jews’ place; he lived here in Africa, in the rocks, in the sky, in places where we knew he liked to be.

It’s a different sort of love taht puts up with illness. Old love.

Believe me, there’s nothing more brittle than human beauty. Encounter it. Savour it, by all means. Then watch how it turns to dust.