Alexander McCall Smith Quotes

You can go through life and make new friends every year - every month practically - but there was never any substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive into adult years. Those are the ones in which we are bound to one another with hoops of steel.

The telling of a story, like virtually everything in this life, was always made all the easier by a cup of tea.

Most people want nothing to happen. That is the problem with governments these days. They want to do things all the time; they are always very busy thinking of what things they can do next. That is not what people want. People want to be left alone to look after their cattle.

Gracious acceptance is an art - an art which most never bother to cultivate. We think that we have to learn how to give, but we forget about accepting things, which can be much harder than giving.... Accepting another person's gift is allowing him to express his feelings for you.

Be content with who you are and where you are, and do whatever you can do to bring to others such contentment, and joy, and understanding that you have managed to find yourself.

There is room in history for all of us.

Regular maps have few surprises: their contour lines reveal where the Andes are, and are reasonably clear. More precious, though, are the unpublished maps we make ourselves, of our city, our place, our daily world, our life; those maps of our private world we use every day; here I was happy, in that place I left my coat behind after a party, that is where I met my love; I cried there once, I was heartsore; but felt better round the corner..., things of that sort, our personal memories, that make the private tapestry of our lives.

Manners are the basic building blocks of civil society.

I see no point in being despondent. We might as well enjoy ourselves during our brief tenure of this life.

It was time to take the pumpkin out of the pot and eat it. In the final analysis, that was what solved these big problems of life. You could think and think and get nowhere, but you still had to eat your pumpkin. That brought you down to earth. That gave you a reason for going on. Pumpkin.

The Culture of Complaint... We live in a culture of complaint because everyone is always looking for things to complain about. It's all tied in with the desire to blame others for misfortunes and to get some form of compensation into the bargain.

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.

Talking about pumpkins doesn't make them grow.

We don't forget.... Our heads may be small, but they are as full of memories as the sky may sometimes be full of swarming bees, thousands and thousands of memories, of smells, of places, of little things that happened to us and which came back, unexpectedly, to remind us who we are.

We think the world is ours forever, but we are little more than squatters.

There are old mycologists and there are bold mycologists, but there are no old, bold mycologists.

A life without stories would be no life at all. And stories bound us, did they not, one to another, the living to the dead, people to animals, people to the land?

And how we become like our parents! How their scorned advice - based, we felt in our superiority, on prejudices and muddled folk wisdom - how their opinions are subsequently borne out by our own discoveries and sense of the world, one after one. And as this happens, we realise with increasing horror that proposition which we would never have entertained before: our mothers were right!

[Edinburgh] is a city of shifting light, of changing skies, of sudden vistas. A city so beautiful it breaks the heart again and again.

Who can't like pigs? They're wonderful creatures! I've always liked pigs.

It is sometimes easier to be happy if you don't know everything.

Do you realise that people die of boredom in London suburbs? It's the second biggest cause of death amongs the English in general. Sheer boredom...

I have always taken the view that one should never hold against a man anything he says after twelve o'clock at night or after a glass or two of anything.

There is plenty of work for love to do.

Whatever Scotland was, it was not a matriarchy; whereas the United States was a profoundly matriarchal society - and much more feminine than would be suggested by all that male bravado. That was a front, and a misleading one at that; underneath the male swagger lay a passive acceptance of female dominance - a fact not always appreciated by outsiders.

They're very beautiful, aren't they? Clouds are very beautiful and yet so often we fail to appreciate them properly. We should do that. We should look at them and think about how lucky we are to have them.

None of us knows how we will cope with snakes until the moment arises, and then most of us find out that we do not do it very well.

One of the most destructive things that's happening in modern society is that we are losing our sense of the bonds that bind people together - which can lead to nightmares of social collapse.

Antonia was very conscious of the corrosive power of envy and felt that it was this emotion, more than any other, which lay behind human unhappiness. People did not realize how widespread envy was.

Reality television, which turned its eye on people who were doing nothing but being themselves, was the perfect expression of this trend [of narcissism]. Let's look at ourselves, it said. Aren't we fascinating?

She was made for untidy rooms and rumpled beds.

I think that we've made great moral progress in the second half of the 20th century in many respects, and particularly in relation to human rights but I think that we are losing sight of some of the values of concern for others, and self-respect and respect for others.

We should be careful of the insults we fling at others, lest they return and land at our feet, newly minted to apply to those who had first coined them.

I'm interested in character and dialogue and exchange of ideas.

There are many women whose lives would be immeasurably improved by widowhood, but one should not always point that out.

Dating is really all about sex. In the conventional context, this means that the man invites the woman to go through a social encounter, the ultimate purpose of which is sexual engagement.

Mma Ramotswe had a detective agency in Africa, at the foot of Kgale Hill. These were its assets: a tiny white van, two desks, two chairs, a telephone, and an old typewriter. Then there was a teapot, in which Mma Ramotswe – the only lady private detective in Botswana – brewed redbush tea. And three mugs – one for herself, one for her secretary, and one for the client. What else does a detective agency really need? Detective agencies rely on human intuition and intelligence, both of which Mma Ramotswe had in abundance. No inventory would ever include those, of course.

As a writer I've learned certain lessons. One of them is to be careful about how you put a view, and to bear in mind how easily and readily you'll be misinterpreted.

The people with the strong, brave exteriors are just as weak and vulnerable as the rest of us. And of course they never admit to their childish practices, their moments of weakness or absurdity, and then the rest of us think that's how it should be.

Any extreme political creed brought only darkness in the long run; it lit up nothing. The best politics were those of caution, tolerance and moderation, Angus maintained, but such politics were, alas, also very dull, and certainly moved nobody to poetry.

A very powerful theme in fiction is that of loss.

We are all tempted, Mma. We are all tempted when it comes to cake.

Well, Id say all of us are a combination of moods and emotions. In my day to day life I dont go around skipping, but at times one can feel sheer exhilarating joy at the world.

It's through the small things that we develop our moral imagination, so that we can understand the sufferings of others.

The point about love, the essential point, was that we loved what we loved. We did not choose. We just loved.

It seems to me that we're in danger of losing sight of certain basic civic values in society by allowing the growth of a whole generation of people who really have no sense of attachment to society.

That of all people, it should be him; that took her aback. That the heart should settle on somebody like him; that surprised her. But she was so certain about it, so certain.

I've also long since realized that the way to really engage children is to give out prizes; it's amazing how it concentrates their minds.

But we make such mistakes all the time, all through our lives. Wisdom, I suppose, is seeing this and acting upon it before it is too late. But it is often too late, isn't it? - and those things that we should have said are unsaid, and remain unsaid for ever.

If your ceiling should fall down, then you have lost a room, but gained a courtyard. Think of it that way.