Quotes by Alexander McCall Smith

She had not come to the shopping centre to buy shoes; she had come to buy food, and there was a big difference between shopping for food and shopping for shoes, and that difference concentrated on one word: guilt.

That was the trouble with people in general: they were surprisingly unrealistic in their expectations.

She was of traditional build herself, but her figure was largely concealed by the folds of a generously cut shift dress made out of a flecked green fabric. It was like a tent, thought Mma Ramotswe--a camouflage tent of the sort that the Botswana Defence Force might use. But I do not sit in judgement on the dresses of others, she told herself, and a tent was a practical enough garment, if that is what one felt comfortable in.

Shall I make you a cup of tea? He asked. It was the classic response to crisis practiced throughout these islands—in England, Scotland, and elsewhere. Emotional turmoil, danger, even disaster could be faced with far greater equanimity if the kettle was switched on. War has been declared! There’s been a major earthquake! The stock market has collapsed! Oh really? Let me put the kettle on….

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.

...the real poison within families is not the poison that you put in your food, but the poison that grows up in the heart when people are jealous of one another and cannot speak these feelings and drain out the poison that way.

...and with it would come that wonderful, unmistakable smell of rain, that smell of dust and water meeting that lingered for a few seconds in the nostrils and then was gone, and would be missed, sometimes for months, before the next time that it caught you and made you stop and say to the person with you, any person: That is the smell of rain, there, right now.

The previously unloved may find it hard to believe that they are now loved; that is such a miracle, they feel; such a miracle.

Bertie stared at his mother. She spoils things, he thought. All she ever does is spoil things. He had not started this conversation, and it was not his fault that they were now talking about Grey Owl. He sounded rather a nice man to Bertie. Any why should he not dress up in feathers and live in the forests if that was what he wanted to do? It was typical of his mother to try to spoil Grey Owls fun.

... You cant read everything. Ive never got beyond the beginning of Proust. I love him, but I cant seem to get beyond about page three.They were comfortable in each others company, and this confession seemed to accentuate the ease of their relationship. The confession itself was not entirely true; Isabel had read more Proust than that, but other people undoubtedly found it reassuring to think that one had only read a few pages. Certainly those who claimed to have read Proust in his entirety got scant sympathy from others. And yet, she suddenly wondered, should you actually lie about how much Proust youve read? Some politicians, she reminded herself, did that--or the equivalent--when they claimed to be down-to-earth, no-nonsense types, just like the voters, when all the time they were secretly delighting in Proust . . .

Our stomachs live in towns, said Mma Potokwani, patting the front of her dress. That is where the work is. Our stomachs know that. But our hearts are usually somewhere else.

However she redefined herself, that part of one that made for the core of the self, that part that we think of as the ultimate, inner being—that was ineradicable Scottish. That part spoke with a Scottish voice; that part looked out through Scottish eyes; and it was that part that now welled within her as she gazed out through the window of the descending plane and saw below her the rolling Borders hills…

And if theres bad behaviour, Mma Potokwane went on. If theres bad behaviour, the quickest way of stopping it is to give more love. That always works, you know. People say we must punish when there is wrongdoing, but if you punish youre only punishing yourself. And whats the point of that?

Everything, all those great things, had happened so far away--or so it seemed to [Mma Ramotswe] at the time. The world was made to sound as if it belonged to other people--to those who lived in distant countries that were so different from Botswana; that was before people had learned to assert that the world was theirs too, that what happened in Botswana was every bit as important, and valuable, as what happened anywhere else.

They sang that song which distills all the suffering and the hope of Africa; that song which had inspired and comforted so many, “Nkosi Sikeleli Afrika,” God Bless Africa, give her life, watch over her children.

She believed in getting as much use as possible from everything, and thought that as long as machinery, or anything else, could be cajoled into operation, it should be kept; to do otherwise, she thought, was wasteful.

It was hard to disappear completely in Botswana, where there were fewer than two million people and where people had a healthy curiosity as to who was who and where people had come from. It was very difficult to be anonymous, even in Gaborone, as there would always be neighbours who would want to know exactly what one was doing and who one’s people had been.

The only thing that makes me sad is that I shall be leaving Africa when I die. I love Africa, which is my mother and my father. When I am dead, I shall miss the smell of Africa

Africa had a way of coming back and simply covering everything up again.

Africa was full of people in need of help and there had to be a limit. You simply could not help everybody; but you could at least help those who came into your life. That principle allowed you to deal with the suffering you saw. That was your suffering. Other people would have to deal with the suffering that they, in their turn, came across.