My Italian Bulldozer Quotes

“I suppose that's the way affairs come to an end. Somebody grabs a fork and stabs the other in the hand. And that's it”
― Alexander McCall Smith, My Italian Bulldozer

“One never gets anywhere unless one leaves,”
― Alexander McCall Smith, My Italian Bulldozer

“Sometimes, you know, good things have to be done—they just have to be done. And most of us—myself included—are too timid to do them. Fortunately, there are brave people who are prepared to take the risk, who do these things, often in such a way that nobody can see them. They say, The world doesn’t have to be the way it is; we can change it. That’s what they say—and then they do it.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, My Italian Bulldozer

“She was, he reflected, one of his closest friends, in a rather curious, slightly old-fashioned way.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, My Italian Bulldozer

“Not all taxi drivers, Paul had discovered, actually wanted to take passengers to their destination; some of them, he felt, were in it for the arguments, or the opportunity to pontificate, or for the sheer pleasure of driving past those trying to summon them at the road edge. He made up his mind. What was the point of having a bulldozer if you were not going to make at least some use of it?”
― Alexander McCall Smith, My Italian Bulldozer

“Then the scales fall from your eyes when you are away from home, in a small hill town in Tuscany, for example, where unusual and extraordinary things happen. And then you realise how rich life is, and how precious.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, My Italian Bulldozer

“Don’t fall in love with this place,” said Onesto. “Italy is a seductress. Remember that.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, My Italian Bulldozer

“He would order a coffee and think. He would let life happen to him rather than make it happen.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, My Italian Bulldozer

“That urge famously launched ships, inspired poetry, destroyed the most ordered lives, but at heart was something so simple and basic that its potency, viewed in the cold light of day, was absurd.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, My Italian Bulldozer

“And yet it existed, and none was immune to its Siren draw.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, My Italian Bulldozer

“There are various forms of artistry, Paul. The person who grows grapes and makes wine is an artist, I think. The person who writes about all that is also an artist.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, My Italian Bulldozer

“These were not the words of somebody who was procrastinating—they were the words of one who was going to finish what he had come to finish, and finish it well.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, My Italian Bulldozer

“Opening the window itself, he filled his lungs with air that bore the scents of the morning, of trees and vines, of the stone of the houses warmed by the sun, of wood smoke from a fire somewhere. It was the scent of place, the subtle signature of an entire landscape. It was the smell of Tuscany.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, My Italian Bulldozer

“So parlare Italiano,” he began. “Sono…” The man did not allow him to finish. “Ah!” he said, and then, continuing in Italian, “What a pleasure it is for us Italians to discover somebody who speaks our language.” “I’m sure there are many. Such a beautiful language…” “Yes, but what use is a beautiful language spoken just by oneself? It’s all very well for the Spaniards, because there are so many Spanish speakers—all over the world. Even Portuguese has Brazil, but we have just us—just Italy—and after a while we get fed up with speaking only to ourselves. We have heard everything there is to say in Italian.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, My Italian Bulldozer

“All I’m saying is that your old friends are the ones to help you get started on a new life. That may seem paradoxical,”
― Alexander McCall Smith, My Italian Bulldozer

“the period of greatest happiness in his life; to be twenty, in Florence, with no commitments and with a sense that life would always be like this, as golden, as full of possibilities.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, My Italian Bulldozer

“La donna è mobile, qual piuma al vento, muta d’accento e di pensiero…”
― Alexander McCall Smith, My Italian Bulldozer

“People do strange things. They fall for the most unlikely people.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, My Italian Bulldozer

“Love of what you do is unmistakable in the care with which you do it,”
― Alexander McCall Smith, My Italian Bulldozer

“often our tears have no particular justification; they are tears for something larger about the world than any private sorrow.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, My Italian Bulldozer

“the past has a much bigger shadow than people believe. It’s still with us in so many ways. At our side all the time, whispering into our ear.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, My Italian Bulldozer

“misery was nothing to do with objective good fortune. Misery was like bad weather; it was just there, and no number of optimistic comments could make the weather better.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, My Italian Bulldozer

“La bella figura...it's at the heart of Italian life...it's about doing things beautifully.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, My Italian Bulldozer

“He felt the touch of cool air wafted out from the interior of the church—the feeble breath of a dying building.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, My Italian Bulldozer

“There was always injustice in any border, in anything. You drew a line and there was always somebody just on the other side; on one side of an arbitrary line there could be happiness and prosperity, on the other misery. But he did not say this.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, My Italian Bulldozer

“He decided there was a lot to be said for bulldozers. They were honest vehicles—honest in the sense that they did not purport to be anything other than what they were.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, My Italian Bulldozer

“Well, that’s an interesting case. With us, the important thing to remember is that we are very young. We have lots of history, of course, but Italy itself is a teenager. The Risorgimento was really just yesterday, you’ll know. It ended in 1871. That’s yesterday. And that means that, as a state, we are still very far from maturity. That’s why half the population doesn’t really believe that the Italian state exists—or, if it does, they feel that they owe it nothing. We’re very disloyal to Rome, you know. We look after ourselves—our family, our city—and we don’t like paying taxes to Rome.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, My Italian Bulldozer

“He did not sleep well.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, My Italian Bulldozer

“nous”
― Alexander McCall Smith, My Italian Bulldozer

“Love of what you do is unmistakable in the care with which you do it, whether it is seen in the way in which an artist applies the final touch of paint to his canvas, a master carpenter sands the last touch of roughness from the surface of the wood, or a woman making pasta kneads the compliant dough, draws it out, coaxes it to the right consistency.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, My Italian Bulldozer