Alexander McCall Smith > Quotes

“You can go through life and make new friends every year - every month practically - but there was never any substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive into adult years. Those are the ones in which we are bound to one another with hoops of steel.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

“It is sometimes easier to be happy if you don't know everything.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Morality for Beautiful Girls

“She was made for untidy rooms and rumpled beds.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Sunday Philosophy Club

“It was time to take the pumpkin out of the pot and eat it. In the final analysis, that was what solved these big problems of life. You could think and think and get nowhere, but you still had to eat your pumpkin. That brought you down to earth. That gave you a reason for going on. Pumpkin.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

“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.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Dream Angus: The Celtic God of Dreams

“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.”
― Alexander McCall Smith

“The telling of a story, like virtually everything in this life, was always made all the easier by a cup of tea.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Miracle at Speedy Motors

“But don't we often lie to people we love, or not tell them things, precisely because we love them?”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

“She had a taste for sugar, however, and this meant that a doughnut or a cake might follow the sandwich. She was a traditionally built lady, after all, and she did not have to worry about dress size, unlike those poor, neurotic people who were always looking in mirrors and thinking that they were too big. What was too big, anyway? Who was to tell another person what size they should be? It was a form of dictatorship, by the thin, and she was not having any of it. If these thin people became any more insistent, then the more generously sized people would just have to sit on them. Yes, that would teach them! Hah!”
― 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 person's gift is allowing him to express his feelings for you.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Love Over Scotland

“Do not act meanly, do not be unkind, because the time for setting things right may pass before your heart changes course.
Isabel Dalhousie”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Careful Use of Compliments

“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.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Double Comfort Safari Club

“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.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Full Cupboard of Life

“Why is it that there are always these problems and misunderstandings between men and women? Surely it would have been better if God had made only one sort of person, and the children had come by some other means, with the rain perhaps.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Kalahari Typing School for Men

“...how sorry she felt for white people, who couldn't do any of this (sit talking with friends and growing melons) and who were always dashing around and worrying themselves over things that were going to happen anyway. What use was it having all the money if you could never sit still or just watch your cattle, and yet they did not know it. Every so often you met a white person who understood, who realized how things really were; but these people were few and far between and the other white people often treated them with suspicion. ”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency

“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?”
― Alexander McCall Smith, In the Company of Cheerful Ladies

“There is room in history for all of us.”
― Alexander McCall Smith

“Regular maps have few surprises: their contour lines reveal where the Andes are, and are reasonably clear. More precious, though, are the unpublished maps we make ourselves, of our city, our place, our daily world, our life; those maps of our private world we use every day; here I was happy, in that place I left my coat behind after a party, that is where I met my love; I cried there once, I was heartsore; but felt better round the corner once I saw the hills of Fife across the Forth, things of that sort, our personal memories, that make the private tapestry of our lives.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Love Over Scotland

“Sorry about your sausage dog.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs

“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.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

“There is plenty of work for love to do.”
― Alexander McCall Smith

“...great things may come from moments of nothingness.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Miracle at Speedy Motors

“But that's exactly the problem, retorted Isabel. We're all stuck with the same tired and trusted ideas. If we refused to entertain the possibility of something radically different, then we'd never make any progress - ever. We'd still be thinking that the sun revolved round the earth.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

“She was not sure if she would want him to have known; we do not always wish for those for whom we long to know that we long for them, especially if the longing is impossible, or inappropriate. . . to be loved by the unlovable was not something that most people could cope with.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

“And if there's bad behaviour," Mma Potokwane went on. "If there's 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 you're only punishing yourself. And what's the point of that?”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

“That is the problem with governments these days. They want to do things all the time; they are always very busy thinking of what things they can do next. That is not what people want. People want to be left alone to look after their cattle.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

“Mma Ramotswe sighed. 'We are all tempted, Mma. We are all tempted when it comes to cake.'

That is true,' said Mma Potokwane sadly. 'There are many temptations in this life, but cake is probably one of the biggest of them.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, In the Company of Cheerful Ladies

“There are many women whose lives would be immeasurably improved by widowhood, but one should not always point that out.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Espresso Tales

“People stuck by others for years and years, in the face of all odds, and it should be relief, not disbelief, that one felt on witnessing it. ”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

“Now constipation was quite a different matter...It would be dreadful for the whole world to know about troubles of that nature. She felt terribly sorry for people who suffered from constipation, and she knew that there were many who did. There were probably enough of them for a political party - which a chance of government. Perhaps - but what would such a party do if it was in power? Nothing, she imagined. It would try to pass legislation, but would fail." (p, 195)”
― Alexander McCall Smith

“Mma Ramotsew accepted her large slice of cake and looked at the rich fruit within it. There were at least seven hundred calories in that, she thought, but it did not matter; she was a traditionally built lady and she did not have to worry about such things.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Morality for Beautiful Girls

“You can go through life and make new friends every year -every month practically- but there was never any substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive adult yerars. Those are the ones in which we are bound to one another with hoops of steel.”
― Alexander McCall Smith

“The point about love, the essential point, was that we loved what we loved. We did not choose. We just loved.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Right Attitude to Rain

“She had not made a lot of money, but she had not made a loss, and she had been happy and entertained. That counted for infinitely more than a vigorously healthy balance sheet. In fact, she thought, annual accounts should include an item specifically headed Happiness, alongside expenses and receipts and the like.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Tears of the Giraffe

“Many waters cannot quench love: the anthem's setting remained in her ears, repeating itself; a tune so powerful that it might gird one against the disappointments of life, rather than make one aware that our attempts to subdue the pain of unrequited love - of impossible love, of love that we are best to put away and not to think about - tended not to work, and only made the wounds of love more painful.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

“Special things have a way of surviving.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The World According To Bertie

“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.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Right Attitude to Rain

“If your ceiling should fall down, then you have lost a room, but gained a courtyard. Think of it that way.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Right Attitude to Rain

“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...”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

“...the thought crossed her mind that a bed was really a very strange thing-a human nest, really, where our human fragility made its nightly demands for comfort and cosseting”
― Alexander McCall Smith

“You are a lucky lady to be marrying a man who can fix things. Most husbands just break things.”
― Alexander McCall Smith

“The Double Comfort Safari Club” /
(Mma Ramotswe thinking about what her father taught her…)

“Having the right approach to life was a great gift in this life….Do not complain about your life. Do not blame others for things that you have brought upon yourself. 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…You can do that in the company of an old friend—you can close your eyes and think of the land that gave you life and breath, and of all the reasons why you are glad that you are there, with the people you know, with the people you love.”
― Alexander McCall Smith

“We can be confident in our dealings with the world when what the world sees is the outer person, with all the outer person's defences: the intimacy of a love affair is a different matter altogether. And who might not feel just the slightest bit insecure under the gaze of a lover--a gaze which falls on birthmarks, on blemishes physical and psychological, on our imperfections and impatience, on our human vulnerability?”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday

“These men were like leeches; they sucked away at the goodness of a woman's heart until it was dry and all her love had been used up. That took a long time, he knew, because women seemed to have vast reservoirs of goodness in them”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

“If you take God out of it, then right and justice become small, human things. And weak things too.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, La's Orchestra Saves the World

“He had been thinking of how landscape moulds a language. It was impossible to imagine these hills giving forth anything but the soft syllables of Irish, just as only certain forms of German could be spoken on the high crags of Europe; or Dutch in the muddy, guttural, phlegmish lowlands.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Portuguese Irregular Verbs

“We like to think that we plan what happens to us, but it is chance, surely, that lies behind so many of the great events of our lives -- the meeting with the person with whom we are destined to spend the rest of our days, the receiving of a piece of advice whic influences our choice of career, the spotting of a particular house for sale; all of these may be put down to pur chance, and yet they govern how our lives work out and how happy--or unhappy--we were going to be.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday

“Isabel saw the intimacy of the gestures and felt immediately empty, a sensation so physical and so overwhelming that she felt for a moment that she might stop breathing, being empty of air”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

“No plaque reminds the passer-by of these glories, although there should be one; for those who invent biscuits bring great pleasure to many.”
― Alexander McCall Smith

“The trouble with Grace, she thought, is that she is so literal. But that was the trouble with most people, when it came down to it; there were very few who enjoyed flights of fantasy, and to have that sort of mind--one which enjoyed dry with and understood the absurd--left one in a shrinking minority.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Careful Use of Compliments