A Song of Comfortable Chairs Quotes

“Words were the very first bandage for any wound.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, A Song of Comfortable Chairs

“The real art in going through life with dignity and with a modicum of happiness was to accept what you were, and, at the same time, to accept others—and to love them all equally. That was hard, and for some people it was impossible, but you had to try. We were all brothers and sisters, after all, and should embrace one another as such. That seemed so obvious, and yet there were people who refused to accept it, and made others unhappy because of their refusal.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, A Song of Comfortable Chairs

“It would have been better to talk,’ muttered Mma Makutsi. Mma Ramotswe agreed. It was always – always – better to talk.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, A Song of Comfortable Chairs

“This advertisement let you be yourself, which is what most people really wanted, when you came to think of it.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, A Song of Comfortable Chairs

“Her tone was breezy. That, she thought, was the best way to talk to teenagers—about anything. You talked to them in that way, as if you were not expecting them to be listening to you—which, of course, they were not.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, A Song of Comfortable Chairs

“They are not much use to anybody, really. It is very sad.” He smiled. “And then, suddenly, at seventeen—sometimes at age sixteen—they grow out of all of that and they become nice once more, just as they were before this terrible thing called adolescence happened to them.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, A Song of Comfortable Chairs

“And as far as fourteen-year-old boys were concerned, she had yet to meet one who was not, at least in some respects, embarrassing or difficult. That, simply, was what fourteen-year-old boys were like.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, A Song of Comfortable Chairs

“We should love one another, she thought, not only because it was the right thing to do, but also because it was far easier than hating one another. People who hated often had to work quite hard at keeping their hatred warm.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, A Song of Comfortable Chairs

“You might disagree with others for what they said or for what they did—that was one thing—but to take against them simply for what they were was to blame them for something over which they had no control, and was cruel, and profoundly wrong.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, A Song of Comfortable Chairs

“He came over the border at night, as he had no papers. It is not easy, Mma, to have no papers. If you are a person without papers, then you are nothing. Even cattle have papers these days, Mma—I’m joking, of course, but that is what it can feel like to have no papers.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, A Song of Comfortable Chairs

“But being a parent hurt—that was part of the arrangement. It hurt and then suddenly it did not hurt any longer, and a loving and reasonable person emerged from the teenage shell, just as the colourful emperor moth emerges from the chrysalis of the mopane worm.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, A Song of Comfortable Chairs

“The real art in going through life with dignity and with a modicum of happiness was to accept what you were, and, at the same time, to accept others—and to love them all equally.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, A Song of Comfortable Chairs

“She liked such stories because it helped people to believe in justice, which we had to believe in if we were not simply to give up in the face of adversity.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, A Song of Comfortable Chairs