Top 141 Quotes & Sayings by Alexander McCall Smith - Page 2

But don't we often lie to people we love, or not tell them things, precisely because we love them?

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.

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.

I cannot see myself in a new car. I am a tiny white van person. That is what i want!

Everything has been something before.

There was a distinction between lying and telling half-truths, but it was a very narrow one.

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.

If you lose sight of the smaller accomplishments , you end up with an imbalance in your life.

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

At night we are all strangers, even to ourselves.

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 More precious, though, are the unpublished maps we make ourselves, of our city, our place, our daily world, our life; those maps of our private world we use every day; here I was happy, in that place I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.

She was made for untidy rooms and rumpled beds.

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...

It would be wonderful to have a guru; it would be like having a social worker or a personal trainer, not that people who had either of these necessarily appreciated the advice they received.

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!

To lose a child ... was something that could end one's world. One could never get back to how it was before. The stars went out. The moon disappeared. The birds became silent.

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.

I write four or five a books a year. That means that I usually have one on the go. I am fortunate in being able to write quickly - 1000 words an hour.

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

Each of us is born into our own mysteries but the mystery of another might just take us in and embrace us. And then what a sense of homecoming, of belonging!

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.

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.

There is plenty of work for love to do.

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.

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?

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

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?

But you cannot expect every writer to dwell on human suffering. I think my books do deal with grave issues. People who say they are too positive probably havent read them.

We all know that it is women who take the decisions, but we have to let men think that the decisions are theirs. It is an act of kindness on the part of women.

Our minds can come up with the most entertaining possibilities, if we let them. But most of the time, we keep them under far too close a check.

Some of my characters are a mixture of various aspects of people I have met. others are pure invention.

Everybody has friends they dislike; people who they have slipped into relationships with, people they would not have chosen had they been more cautious, more circumspect.

Small things may be important to us; to be a sometime anything is sometimes something.

The problem, of course, was that people did not seem to understand the difference between right and wrong. They needed to be reminded about this, because if you left it to them to work out for themselves, they would never bother. They would just find out what was best for them, and then they would call that the right thing. That's how most people thought.

Lou knew that joy unshared was a halved emotion, just as sadness and loss, when borne alone, were often doubled.

I enjoy women's conversation, and I think that helps me to describe them in fiction.

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.

Life consists of positive and negative features, and I think that it is permissible to write about both.

And that, in a way, was the burden of being a philosopher: one knew what one had to do, but it was so often the opposite of what one really wanted to do.

When you allow people to do what they wish, then that is what they do. They stop doing the things they need to do.

I am just a tiny person in Africa, but there is a place for me, and for everybody, to sit down on this earth and touch it and call it their own.

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

I am often thanked by people for inventing the term traditionally built. The people who give me thanks for this are often traditionally built themselves.

Dogs are in on our human silliness; lions are not.

Self-pity does not appreciate pedantry.

Old friends, like old shoes, are comfortable. But old shoes, unlike old friends, tend not to be supportive: it is easier to stumble and sprain an ankle while wearing a pair of old shoes than it is in new shoes, with their less yielding leather.

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

Talking about pumpkins doesn't make them grow.

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

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.

International business, once allowed to stalk uncontrolled, killed the local, the small, the quirky.

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.

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.

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

Do not take on a traditionally built person unless you are prepared for a heavyweight bout.

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

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.

Every small wrong, every minor act of cruelty, every act of petty bullying was symbolic of a greater wrong. And if we ignored these small things, then did it not blunt our outrage over the larger wrongs?

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.

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.