Trains and Lovers Quotes

“That's the curious thing about love, isn't it? It makes very ordinary things seem special. It makes them seem so much more valuable than they really are.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Trains and Lovers

“The ordinary you, the you that has to go to work every morning, the you that has to run a household, pay bills, do all of those things--that you is somehow changed into an exciting, artistic, fully alive you. That's what Paris does.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Trains and Lovers

“There's a difference, I think, between falling in love and knowing it.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Trains and Lovers

“...has it ever occurred to people that love at first sight might be the rule rather than the exception? How many people fall in love gradually rather than on the first occasion they meet the other person?”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Trains and Lovers

“Everything is possible in love. In the heart of each of us there can be many rooms, and sometimes there are.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Trains and Lovers

“There are so many ways of falling off the high moral ground you’ve carefully built up for yourself. Moral ground is like that—slippery at the edges.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Trains and Lovers

“The new lover, of a few weeks standing, may seem more precious than friends of decades.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Trains and Lovers

“So what is this love that comes with being married?" ... "Being fond of somebody? Being nice? Wanting them not to go away? ... the line struck me with its poetic force. I didn't want you to go away... It was certainly powerful, and perhaps it was as good a definition of love as any other.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Trains and Lovers

“People talk of the wrench of parting, and that, he felt, was exactly what it was. Take a metal object off a magnet and one would experience that - there was the draw, the tug, the flow of the bond even through the air, and then the sudden detaching as separation occurred. That was what it was like. That was human parting. You felt it; you felt the separation, just as you would feel the rending of tissue being pulled apart.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Trains and Lovers

“You might imagine that the magic stopped at the airport, and to a great extent it did. When we arrived back in London, the skies were overcast and heavy. The bus driver from the airport was morose and unkempt; the streets seemed run-down and dirty, the people sour-faced. But that, I suspect, is how coming home is for everyone; Parisians probably felt the same when they returned from somewhere else.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Trains and Lovers

“[...] Look at the way people try to make points of contact with others when they meet. Look at the way you instinctively try to establish whether somebody you meet for the first time knows somebody you know. Watch people do it. I'm from such and such place. Oh yes? So you know So-and-So? Yes! And So-and-So? No, I don't know her, but of course, there's So-and-So. That's how it works."

"I suppose so. But why?"

"Because we don't like impersonality. Maybe..."

David joined in. "Because we had to."

She asked him: "Had to what?"

"Because he had to co-operate. That's deep in the genes. We had to co-operate with one another and so we needed to know whether the stranger was a threat. [...]”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Trains and Lovers

“Already many of the memories of the previous two weeks had faded: the smell of that small hotel in St. Andrews; that mixture of bacon cooking for breakfast and the lavender-scented soap in the bathroom; the air from the sea drifing across the golf course; the aroma of coffee in the coffee bar in South Street. She should have noted them down. She should have said something about all that and the light and the hills with sheep on them like small white stones.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Trains and Lovers

“You can hear the train in those lines; you can feel its rocking motion.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Trains and Lovers

“Love is nothing out of the ordinary, even if we think it is; even if we idealise it, celebrate it in poetry, sentimentalise it in coy valentines. Love happens to just about everyone; it is like measles or the diseases of childhood; it is as predictable as the losing of milk teeth, or the breaking of a boy's voice.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Trains and Lovers

“It's easy to be foolish... It's dead simple, really. All you have to be is human and to allow yourself to do the human things, like fall in love with somebody when you know that there's no point and when you know, too, that it's just going to make you unhappy.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Trains and Lovers

“[Love] may bring surprise, joy, despair and, occasionally, perfect happiness.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Trains and Lovers

“People tried to understand, and many did, but not everybody could make the imaginative leap that landed one in the position of another person, in their shoes, in their very garments, looking out on the world with their eyes, feeling what went on inside their hearts; being made to cry by the things that made them want to cry. That was easy in theory, but hard in practice. They pretended to understand, but when it came down to it, many simply did not.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Trains and Lovers

“Loving others, she thought, is the good thing we do in our lives.”
― Alexander McCall Smith , Trains and Lovers

“You can't deceive your own mother. That's the one person, the only one, to whom you will always be transparent.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Trains and Lovers

“Look at the way people try to make points of contact with others when they meet. Look at the way you instinctively try to establish whether somebody you meet for the first time knows somebody you know.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Trains and Lovers

“That's the way things are, don't you think? It's human nature. We do things for people we know. Everybody does that.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Trains and Lovers

“Already many of the memories of the previous two weeks had faded: the smell of that small hotel in St. Andrews; that mixture of bacon cooking for breakfast and the lavender-scented soap in the bathroom; the air from the sea drifting across the golf course; the aroma of coffee in the coffee bar in South Street. She should have noted them down. She should have said something about all that and the light and the hills with sheep on them like small white stones.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Trains and Lovers

“And then there is the poet Kenneth Koch, who while travelling in Kenya came to a railroad crossing at which this sign was posted: One train may hide another. This was meant, of course, as a warning to drivers of the fact that the train you see may not be the only train to reckon with, but it also meant, as Koch points out in his poem, that there are many things in this life that conceal other things. One letter may mean another is on the way; one hitch-hiker may deliberately hide another one by the side of the road; offer to carry one bag and you may find there is another one hidden behind it, with the result that you must carry two. And so on through life. Do not count on things coming in ones.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Trains and Lovers

“It's easy to be foolish... It's dead simple, really. All you have to be is human and to allow yourself to do the human things, like fall in love with somebody when you know that there's no point and when you know, too, that it's just going to make you unhappy. It's better to be stoic - to be one of those people who manage to keep themselves to themselves, who manage to avoid letting go and becoming entangled in something that they know from experience is going to cause unhappiness. Or is it? There were people who chose that, and seemed to do it successfully, but weren't they filled with regret? Inside, where nobody could see, didn't it hurt them to think about what they never had?”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Trains and Lovers

“It was safer, he thought, to keep it to himself; because there are many ways of loving.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Trains and Lovers

“We change the earth and our changes may only be temporary; yet the signs of what we have done may persist, as these mounds did.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Trains and Lovers

“...thinking about somebody every day of his life... oh yes, he said to himself. Oh yes, you do. You think about somebody. He fills your world. He is all about you, a presence, and you think about him; you can't help it, because he's always there, in your thoughts. But you know, of course, that all the while you're thinking about him, he's not thinking about you. That's the hardest thing about it. That's what makes it so very, very hard to bear. So hard that sometimes you just sit there and let the misery wash over you; the misery, the emptiness.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Trains and Lovers

“Love had transformed the world for me. Transformed it.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Trains and Lovers

“But for each person who is made happy by love, there will be many for whom it turns out to be a cause of regret. That is because it can be so fleeting; one moment it may take our breath away, the next it may leave us bereft. When it does that, love can be like a haunting, staying with us for year after year; we know that it is gone, but somehow we persuade ourselves that it is still there... Nobody would choose to be in love like that, to hold on so strongly to something that was no longer there.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Trains and Lovers