The Winds from Further West Quotes

“Potatoes have never really inspired many metaphors, have they? Unlike flowers.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Winds from Further West

“The barricades in this life, someone had once said to him, are never in quite the place that we’d like them to be. That did not mean, though, that we were excused from defending them.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Winds from Further West

“The creation of otherness. Yes, that’s exactly what’s going on. We live in a time of otherness.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Winds from Further West

“It’s a clinical sign of psychopathy, I think – taking somebody else’s parking place. It shows a complete disregard for the norms of civilized society. Wars have started on lesser pretexts.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Winds from Further West

“It’s other people who are the problem, I sometimes think.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Winds from Further West

“Historical hatreds are like Japanese knotweed – the roots go deep, spread out in every direction, and are difficult to eradicate. The only way of dealing with them is to allow forgetfulness to do its work.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Winds from Further West

“She belonged to a generation that knew so little and so much at the same time. When they were knowledgeable, they were very knowledgeable, but when they were ignorant, as he suspected she might be, then their ignorance tended to be profound.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Winds from Further West

“Love was an ache – an ache of the soul that was the authentic signature of love.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Winds from Further West

“He shrugged. “I like the word zeitgeist. It explains a lot. The zeitgeist at the moment is one of suspicion and hostility. We’ve stopped liking one another, I think. We used to be tolerant. We used to like not only others, but ourselves. That’s changed, I’m afraid. All we hear about now is anger. Everybody’s angry with everybody else.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Winds from Further West: A Novel

“He resented this. “That’s not true,” he countered, feeling the back of his neck becoming warm. They said that was a sure sign of conservatism, but he rejected such glib views. Anybody could feel hot at the back of their neck.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Winds from Further West

“If equally affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Winds from Further West

“I suppose that we need to try to get back some of the things we’ve lost: courtesy, listening to the other point of view, helping one another, accepting that people may have different ideas of the good; accepting, too, that people may be flawed but not entirely wicked.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Winds from Further West

“People seemed to need an idea of the Other onto whom they could project their disappointments or fears about themselves.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Winds from Further West