Quotes by Alexander McCall Smith

The value of money is subjective, depending on age. At the age of one, one multiplies the actual sum by 145,000, making one pound seem like 145,000 pounds to a one-year-old. At seven – Bertie’s age – the multiplier is 24, so that five pounds seems like 120 pounds. At the age of twenty four, five pounds is five pounds; at forty five it is divided by 5, so that it seems like one pound and one pound seems like twenty pence. (All figures courtesy of Scottish Government Advice Leaflet: Handling your Money.)

She had always understood that love could have an intense physical effect; could fill a space somewhere in the chest, could turn knees weak, could raise the pulse; could intoxicate, just as could a strong martini or a glass of champagne. Could, she thought, and would…but only if you allowed it, only if you opened whatever portals of the heart needed to be opened. And some people, of course, found it difficult to do that.

She did not think that those who were late, or the ancestors themselves, would wish punishment upon us, no matter what our transgressions. It was far more likely that there would be love, falling like rain from above, changing the hearts of the wicked; transforming them

People don’t talk about mercy very much these days—it has a rather old-fashioned ring to it. but it exists and its power is quite extraordinary

…the world was a vale of tears—it always had been.

Mma Ramotswe reflected on how easy it was to find oneself committed to a course of action simply because one lacked the courage to say no.

...But I do like the idea of household gods--shall we get some? A set of little statues and bring the boys up to believe in them?I hope they believe in something, said Elspeth. Imagaine believing in nothing at all--not even in love, or justice, or any of the things that can make people passionate.Such as a country?Elspeth thought about this. I suppose there are lots of people who believe in Scotland. Or the European Union, for that matter. Their belief anables them to ... well, to talk about the future with enthusiasm. They dont like things as they are and they are convinced that things will be much improved once they are otherwise.Well, why not? asked Matthew.I didnt say there was any reason why not. Im just commenting on that sort of belief. The trouble is that it might make discussion difficult. If somebody believes to strongly in one particular solution to the worlds problems, then it may obscure the nuances. Thats all I was saying. Elspeth paused. They may not see that there are others who have a different view. You can love things in a whole lot of different ways, cant you?

Myth could be as sustaining as reality - sometimes even more so.

She was made for untidy rooms and rumpled beds.

Matthew knew that phrenology was nonsense, and yet, years later, he found himself making judgments similar to those made by his father; slippery people looked slippery; they really did. And how we become like our parents! How their scorned advice - based, we felt in our superiority, on prejudiced and muddled folk wisdom - how their opinions are subsequently borne out by our own discoveries and sense of the world, one after one. And as this happens, we realise with increasing horror that proposition which we would never have entertained before: our mothers were right!

The recipe for each child is just for that child, even if it is the same mother and father.

I have a feeling that weve seen the dismantling of civilisation, brick by brick, and now were looking into the void. We thought that we were liberating people from oppressive cultural circumstances, but we were, in fact, taking something away from them. We were killing off civility and concern. We were undermining all those little ties of loyalty and consideration and affection that are necessary for human flourishing. We thought that tradition was bad, that it created hidebound societies, that it held people down. But, in fact, what tradition was doing all along was affirming community and the sense that we are members of one another. Do we really love and respect one another more in the absence of tradition and manners and all the rest? Or have we merely converted one another into moral strangers - making our countries nothing more than hotels for the convenience of guests who are required only to avoid stepping on the toes of other guests?

A moral dilemma is equally absorbing whether the stakes are the destiny of nations or the happiness of one or two people - at the most.

But hell never be fully recognised, because Scots literature these days is all about complaining and moaning and being injured in ones soul.

Perhaps trust had to be accompanied by a measure of common sense, and a hefty dose of realism about human nature. But that would need a lot of thinking about, and the tea break did not go on forever.

Great feuds often need very few words to resolve them. Disputes, even between nations, between peoples, can be set to rest with simple acts of contrition and corresponding forgiveness, can so often be shown to be based on nothing much other than pride and misunderstanding, and the forgetting of the humanity of the other—and land, of course.

...Perhaps part of the secret of leading a life in which you would not always be worrying about things, or complaining about them, was to accept that there were people who just saw things differently from you and always would. Once you understood that, then you could accept the people themselves as they were and not try to change them. What was even more important, perhaps, was that you could love those people who looked at things so differently, because you realized that they were not trying to make life hard for you by being what they were, but were simply doing their best. Then, when you started to love them, love would do the work that it always did and it would begin to transform them and then they would end up seeing things in the same way that you did.

Can you forgive her? Can you do that?There was no response.Because if you can start to forgive, then it will become easier.And?And then you will be able to forgive yourself—and ask others to forgive you.

She would not allow herself to remember how Note had treated her, and many others too, she suspected. She had forgiven him, yes, but she still did not like to remember. And perhaps a deliberate act of forgetting went along with forgiveness. You forgave, and then you said to yourself: Now I shall forget. Because if you did not forget, then your forgiveness would be tested, perhaps many times and in ways that you could not resist, and you might go back to anger, and to hating.

Memories of that which we have lost are curious things - weeks, months, even years may pass without recollection of them and then, quite suddenly, something will remind us of a lost friend, or of a favourite possession that has been mislaid or destroyed, and then we think: Yes, that is what I have had and I have no longer