The Right Attitude to Rain Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“There was nothing more unattractive than narcissism, she thought: nothing could transform beauty into a cloying, unattractive quality than that self-conscious appreciation of self.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Right Attitude to Rain

“Protestations of happiness could sound almost boasting to those whose happiness is incomplete. One did not boast of perfect skin to one affected by dermatitis; for the same reason, perhaps, one should take care in proclaiming one's happiness.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Right Attitude to Rain

“When you are with somebody you love the smallest, smallest things can be so important, so amusing because love transforms the world, everything. And was that what had happened?”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Right Attitude to Rain

“That, said Isabel, is the most painful feature of lost love. you wonder what the other person is doing. Right at this moment. What is he/she doing?”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Right Attitude to Rain

“We never realise how transparent we are.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Right Attitude to Rain

“The rules of the jungle did not apply to those who wrote the rules of the jungle.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Right Attitude to Rain

“...because love can come, if you believe in it and behave as if it exists. That was the case, too, with free will; with perhaps, fath of any sort; and love was a sort of faith, was it not?”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Right Attitude to Rain

“We act out our lives to a soundtrack, thought Isabel, the music that becomes, for a spell, out favourite and is listened to again and again until it stands for the time itself. But that was about all the scripting that we achieved; the rest, for most of us, was extemporising.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Right Attitude to Rain

“It was easy to be moral when that was the way you felt anyway. The hard bit about morality was making yourself feel the opposite of what you really felt.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Right Attitude to Rain

“She had been tied to an incubus, the memory of a love that had been rejected and had had nowhere to go; she had been locked into a dead relationship and now the last dried skin of it had fallen away, like the scab on a wound, and she was free.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Right Attitude to Rain

“In bed that night, in the darkness, with the illuminated dial of her alarm clock glowing from the bedside table, she asked herself whether one could force oneself to like somebody, or whether one could merely create conditions for affection to come into existence and hope that it did, spontaneously. Open then our hearts - these words came into her mind, dredged from somewhere in her memory, from some unknown context. If one opened one's heart, then friendship, and love, too, might alight and make their presence known. It was the act of opening that came first; that was the important thing, the first thing. But who was it who said, Open then our hearts? Where did that come from?”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Right Attitude to Rain

“Out in Saxe-Coburg Street she stood still for a moment and looked at the gardens. He kissed me, she thought. He made the move; I didn't. The thought was an overwhelming one and invested the everyday world about her, the world of the square, of trees, of people walking by, with a curious glow, a chiaroscuro which made everything precious. It was the feeling, she imagined, that one had when one vouchsafed a vision. Everything is changed, becomes more blessed, making the humblest of surroundings a holy place.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Right Attitude to Rain

“We chose younger and younger politicians to lead us because they looked good on television and were sharp. But really we should be looking for wisdom, and choosing people who had acquired it; and such people, in general, looked bad on television - gray, lined, thoughtful.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Right Attitude to Rain

“For each of us, she thought, there is out completeness in another. Whether we find it, or it finds us, or it eludes all finding is a matter of moral luck.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Right Attitude to Rain

“It's a different sort of love taht puts up with illness. Old love.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Right Attitude to Rain

“She felt that she had revealed something to Cat, and with revealing something about oneself there always comes a sense of lightening of the load that we all carry; the load of being ourselves.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Right Attitude to Rain

“Which is how most people acted when it came to temptation. They gave in. And we should never forget, thought Isabel, that every one of us is capable of doing the same thing if the game that we see for ourselves is large enough.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Right Attitude to Rain

“There were worlds within worlds, and each will have within its confines values and meaning. It may not really matter to the world at large, thought Isabel, that I should feel happy rather than sad, but it matters to me, and the fact that it matters matters.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Right Attitude to Rain

“You haven't offended me at all. You've made me think. That's all.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Right Attitude to Rain

“She had noticed that there was a tendency on the part of some Americans to believe that everybody, deep inside, wanted to live in America, and that it was inexplicable that people who could do so did not.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Right Attitude to Rain

“In bed that night, in the darkness, with the illuminated dial of her alarm clock glowing from the bedside table, she asked herself whether one could force oneself to like somebody, or whether one could merely create the conditions for affection to come into existence and hope that it did, spontaneously.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Right Attitude to Rain

“How many of us are happy to be exactly where we are at any moment?”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Right Attitude to Rain

“Artists were allowed to do that - to look, to gaze at others and try to find out what it was that they were feeling - but we, who were not artists, were not. If one looked too hard that would be considered voyeurism, or nosienss, which is what Cat, her neice, had accused her of more than once. Jamie - the boyfriend rejected by Cat but kept on by Isabel as a friend - had done the same althought more tactfully. He had said that she needed to draw a line in the world with me written on one side and you on the other. Me would be her business; you would be the business of others, and an invitation would be required to cross the line.
She had said to Jamie: "Not a good idea, Jamie. What if people on the other side of the line are in trouble?"
That's different," he said. "You help them."
By streching a hand across this line of yours?"
Of course. Helping people is different."
She had said: "But then we have to know what they need, don't we? We have to be aware of others. If we went about concerned with only our own little world, how would we know when there was trouble brewing on the other side of the line?”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Right Attitude to Rain

“To be able to imagine the ohter, and the experience of the other was what wisdome was all about; but nobody talked about wisdom very much anymore, nor virtue perhaps because wisdom was nto appreciated in a world of glitz and effect.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Right Attitude to Rain

“The whole culture of work had become so intrusive and demanding that people had to do it. And the result was that they were left with little time for simply living their lives, for going for a walk, for sitting in a bar, for reading a book. It was all work.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Right Attitude to Rain

“Nobody enjoys being on display," said Isabel. But then she thought: Some do, and so she added, "Except actors. And narcissists.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Right Attitude to Rain

“None of us is immune to shipwreck. Come, beckons the fatal shore: come and die on my white sands, it said. And we do.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Right Attitude to Rain