Love in the Time of Bertie Quotes

“But Domenica thought: I really would like things to be forever. I would like to be able to sit at this table once a week, perhaps, with these friends. I would like to talk about the things we talk about, the small things, whatever happened in the world. I would like to wake up in the morning and not think that things were getting worse. I would like not to have to listen to the exchange of insults between politicians. I would like to hear of people co-operating with one another and helping others and bringing succour and comfort to the needy and... and I would like not to think that we were still in the seventeenth century, as divided amongst ourselves as they were at that time, pitted against each other, with one vision of the good battling another, and people despising others for their opinions.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Love in the Time of Bertie

“The manacles we forge for ourselves might be comfortable ones, may not chafe too much, and yet they are manacles nonetheless – bonds of family, of profession, of debt, of personal obligation. Or they may be woven of the simple and only too familiar lassitude that prevents us from doing anything to disturb the established patterns of our life.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Love in the Time of Bertie

“Everything was so clear-cut to the student mind; the truth was passionately proclaimed, rather than half-believed in, which was how more experienced people thought of things. The more experienced had generally discovered that there were no longer any privileged, exclusive truths – there were just the various shades of possibility.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Love in the Time of Bertie

“There are roads to Damascus, she told herself. People travel on them.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Love in the Time of Bertie

“It did not matter in the least what bed you were born in: what counted was what you were inside. People in England, she suspected, sometimes just did not grasp that and that was a pity: their society was more stratified than Scotland's; they needed to read Robert Burns’s A Man’s a Man for a’ That, she felt, because that said all that had to be said on that subject. If you understood what Burns was saying in that poem, then you understood how Scotland felt—at heart.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Love in the Time of Bertie

“If your friend smells of fish you should not try to let it affect your friendship. Everybody, thought Ranald Braveheart Macpherson, knows that.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Love in the Time of Bertie

“That was always the case, she thought: the perfect riposte, the mot juste, inevitably occurred well after the event, and one could not really write to somebody and tell them what you would have said had you thought about it in time.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Love in the Time of Bertie

“There were times when one thought the opposite of what one really felt. That was very common, and this was an example of exactly that.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Love in the Time of Bertie

“There are plenty of good stories. There are plenty of good people who go through life without … well, without anger. Who are kind to other folk. Who don't rant and rage.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Love in the Time of Bertie

“One might forget so many exotic cheeses, he thought, but the memory of cheddar always remained.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Love in the Time of Bertie

“You can’t condemn the present for the wrongs of the past.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Love in the Time of Bertie

“Big Lou sighed. “The Devil’s just a tattie-bogle. And there’s no such place as Hell, Bob.” Bob hesitated. “No, I don’t think there is. But why did they tell us all that?” “It was a useful threat, Bob. Fear works. It secured compliance.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Love in the Time of Bertie

“It was the beauty of the country before them that had done it. Scotland was a place of attenuated light, of fragility, of a beauty that broke the heart.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Love in the Time of Bertie

“Angus turned to Domenica. "This view always makes me feel sad. I don't know why, but it does." He drew in his breath, savouring the freshness of the air. Freshly mown grass was upon it, and the smell of lavender, too, from Elspeth's kitchen garden. "Well, perhaps not sad--more wistful, perhaps, which is one notch below actual sadness.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Love in the Time of Bertie