Alexander McCall Smith Quotes

It was easy to make a difference to other people’s lives, so easy to change the little room in which people lived their life.

Africa was full of people in need of help and there had to be a limit. You simply could not help everybody; but you could at least help those who came into your life. That principle allowed you to deal with the suffering you saw. That was your suffering. Other people would have to deal with the suffering that they, in their turn, came across.

It was hard to disappear completely in Botswana, where there were fewer than two million people and where people had a healthy curiosity as to who was who and where people had come from. It was very difficult to be anonymous, even in Gaborone, as there would always be neighbours who would want to know exactly what one was doing and who one’s people had been.

However she redefined herself, that part of one that made for the core of the self, that part that we think of as the ultimate, inner being—that was ineradicable Scottish. That part spoke with a Scottish voice; that part looked out through Scottish eyes; and it was that part that now welled within her as she gazed out through the window of the descending plane and saw below her the rolling Borders hills…

Our stomachs live in towns," said Mma Potokwani, patting the front of her dress. 'That is where the work is. Our stomachs know that. But our hearts are usually somewhere else.

...and with it would come that wonderful, unmistakable smell of rain, that smell of dust and water meeting that lingered for a few seconds in the nostrils and then was gone, and would be missed, sometimes for months, before the next time that it caught you and made you stop and say to the person with you, any person: That is the smell of rain, there, right now.

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.

Shall I make you a cup of tea? He asked. It was the classic response to crisis practiced throughout these islands—in England, Scotland, and elsewhere. Emotional turmoil, danger, even disaster could be faced with far greater equanimity if the kettle was switched on. War has been declared! There’s been a major earthquake! The stock market has collapsed! Oh really? Let me put the kettle on….