Quotes by Alexander McCall Smith

Gracious acceptance is an art - an art which most never bother to cultivate. We think that we have to learn how to give, but we forget about accepting things, which can be much harder than giving.... Accepting another persons gift is allowing him to express his feelings for you.

The language of Cats generation was far harder than that of her own, and more pithily correct: in their terms, he was a hunk. But why, she wondered, should anybody actually want a hunk, when non-hunks were so much more interesting?

Men are very sensitive, Mma Makutsi. You would not always think it to look at them, but they are. They do not like you to point out that they are wrong, even when they are. That is the way things are, Mma--it just is.

Boys, men, she said. Theyre all the same. They think that this [their manhood] is something special and theyre all so proud of it. They do not know how ridiculous it is.

You should have seen him,” she said. “A real ladies’ man. Stuff in his hair. Dark glasses. Fancy shoes. He had no idea how funny he looked. I much prefer men with ordinary shoes and honest trousers.

If we let the men talk about them and decide them, then suddenly we wake up and find out that the men have made all the decisions, and these decisions all suit men.

Men, she thought, were odd about their clothes: they liked to wear the same things until they became defeated and threadbare.

It shall be an offence for any man, either a husband or other person of the male sex, married or otherwise, being over the age of twelve years, to throw any item of clothing having been worn by the said person for whatever length of time, upon the floor of any bathroom or any room adjacent to and connected to a bathroom, without good cause.

He will be a small man inside, said Mma Ramotswe. He will feel small and unimportant. That is why he needs to put ladies down, Mma. Men who are big inside never feel the need to do that.

Men can be teenagers until well into their twenties. That is well known

International business, once allowed to stalk uncontrolled, killed the local, the small, the quirky.

She knew that she had a tendency to allow her mind to wander, but surely thats what made the world interesting. One thought led to another, one memory triggered another. How dull it would be, she thought, not to be reminded of the interconnectedness of everything, how dull for the present not to evoke the past, for here not to imply there.

We dont forget...Our heads may be small, but they are as full of memories as the sky may sometimes be full of swarming bees, thousands and thousands of memories, smells of places, of little things that happened to us and which come back, unexpectedly, to remind us of who we are.

. . . there was something that Isabel had said that always stuck in his mind. Remember what you have and the other person doesnt. It was simple--almost too simple--advice and yet, like all such home advice, it expressed a profound truth.

It was a good thing to be an African. There were terrible things that happened in Africa, things that brought shame and despair when one thought about them, but that was not all there was in Africa. However great the suffering of the people of Africa, however harrowing the cruelty and chaos brought about by soldiers—small boys with guns, really—there was still so much in Africa from which one could take real pride. There was the kindness, for example, and the ability to smile, and the art and the music.

If we treated others with the consideration that one would give to those who only had a few days to live, then we would be kinder, at least.

She knew as well as anyone that the world could be a place of trial and sorrow, that there was injustice and suffering and heartlessness - there was enough of all that to fill the great Kalahari twice over, but what good did it do to ponder that and that alone? None, she thought.

When people ask for advice they very rarely want your advice and will go ahead and do what they want to do anyway, no matter what you say. That applied in every sort of case; it was a human truth of universal application, but one which most people knew little or nothing about.

It was a voice that you felt you had to listen to—or you ignored at your peril.

There was no point in telling somebody not to cry, she had always thought; indeed there were times when you should do exactly the opposite, when you should urge people to cry, to start the healing that sometimes only tears can bring. But if there was a place for tears of relief, there might even be a place for tears of pride[.]