100 Alexander McCall Smith Quotes To Keep You High-Spirited
It is sometimes easier to be happy if you don't know everything.
She was made for untidy rooms and rumpled beds.
We all know that it is women who make the decisions, but we have to let men think that the decisions are theirs. It is an act of kindness on the part of women.
The telling of a story, like virtually everything in this life, was always made all the easier by a cup of tea.
That of all people, it should be him; that took her aback. That the heart should settle on somebody like him; that surprised her. But she was so certain about it, so certain.
Be content with who you are and where you are, and do whatever you can do to bring to others such contentment, and joy, and understanding that you have managed to find yourself.
A life without stories would be no life at all. And stories bound us, did they not, one to another, the living to the dead, people to animals, people to the land?
Do not act meanly, do not be unkind, because the time for setting things right may pass before your heart changes course. Isabel Dalhousie
But don't we often lie to people we love, or not tell them things, precisely because we love them?
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Every man has a map in his heart of his own country and that the heart will never allow you to forget this map. (p. 18)
...great things may come from moments of nothingness.
There are many women whose lives would be immeasurably improved by widowhood, but one should not always point that out.
If your ceiling should fall down, then you have lost a room, but gained a courtyard. Think of it that way.
There is room in history for all of us.
There is plenty of work for love to do.
I am just a tiny person in Africa, but there is a place for me, and for everybody, to sit down on this earth and touch it and call it their own.
Traditional Botswana men like ladies who are more traditionally shaped. You and I, Mma. We remind men of how things used to be in Botswana before these modern-shaped ladies started to get men all confused.
The previously unloved may find it hard to believe that they are now loved; that is such a miracle, they feel; such a miracle.
Special things have a way of surviving.
You are a lucky lady to be marrying a man who can fix things. Most husbands just break things.
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.
Do you realise that people die of boredom in London suburbs? It's the second biggest cause of death amongs the English in general. Sheer boredom...
Sorry about your sausage dog.
We should be careful of the insults we fling at others, lest they return and land at our feet, newly minted to apply to those who had first coined them.
There was a distinction between lying and telling half-truths, but it was a very narrow one.
How many of us are happy to be exactly where we are at any moment?...only the completely happy think that they are in the correct place.
This was a townscape raised in the teeth of cold winds from the east; a city of winding cobbled streets and haughty pillars; a city of dark nights and candlelight, and intellect.
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.
The point about love, the essential point, was that we loved what we loved. We did not choose. We just loved.
This is a city of shifting light, of changing skies, of sudden vistas. A city so beautiful it breaks the heart again and again.
