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"And the memory made her humble, for we should not forget what it is to be young and to have ideas and attitudes that may later seem so fanciful."
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"Most of us would benefit greatly from recognizing and accepting the difference between our history and our destiny."
"I get glimmers of the bad nineteenth-century teaching which has made Mother remove God from the realm of mystery and beauty and glory, but why do people half my age think that they don't have faith unless their faith is small and comprehensible and like a good old plastic Jesus?"
"A summer rain had left the night clean and sparkling with drops of water. I leaned against the end pillar of the gallery, my head touching the soft tendrils of a jasmine which grew there in a constant battle with a wisteria, and I thought of what lay before me throughout the world and throughout time, and resolved to go about it delicately and reverently, learning that from each thing which would take me best to another."
"When the minds of men slip from realities to fantasies without thinking of the future consequences, then we must ponder. When the hearts of men are entangled with what though might seem great but yet, specious ambitions without pondering over the resulting footprints, then we ought to take precautions. When the hands of men unwittingly and for the sake of self-gratification find the right weapons and dexterity for the wrong purpose, then massacre and cruelties leave indelible footprints of sorrow and bitterness in the hearts of men. We shall always look back to the footprints of yesterday to say had we know if we don't take a critical look at today's footsteps. There is always an alternative that is better than good."
"Solitude is a wonderful treasure the world is still yet to discover."
"Montag shook his head. He looked at a blank wall. The girl's face was there, really quite beautiful in memory: astonishing, in fact. She had a very thin face like the dial of a small clock seen faintly in a dark room in the middle of a night when you waken to see the time and see the clock telling you the hour and the minute and the second, with a white silence and a glowing, all certainty and knowing what it had to tell of the night passing swiftly on toward further darknesses, but moving also toward a new sun."
"Write a complaint letter. Then answer it."
"The Golden Age was never the present Age."
"If you give into your emotional illusions, and you will find yourself lost in a maze with no exits, nor entrances, but winding paths that lead you in circles so many times that you grow familiar and comfortable with the very place you shouldn't be in."
"If you are still tied to your past, the devil will keep using it as a weapon against you."
Explore more quotes by Alexander McCall Smith
"The value of money is subjective, depending on age. At the age of one, one multiplies the actual sum by 145,000, making one pound seem like 145,000 pounds to a one-year-old. At seven " Bertie's age " the multiplier is 24, so that five pounds seems like 120 pounds. At the age of twenty four, five pounds is five pounds; at forty five it is divided by 5, so that it seems like one pound and one pound seems like twenty pence. (All figures courtesy of Scottish Government Advice Leaflet: Handling your Money.)"
"It was always the best way of finding out information; just go and ask a woman who keeps her eyes and ears open and who likes to talk. It always worked. It was no use asking men; they simply were not interested enough in other people and the ordinary doings of people. That is why the real historians of Africa had always been the grandmothers, who remembered the lineage and the stories that went with it."
"Men, she thought, were odd about their clothes: they liked to wear the same things until they became defeated and threadbare."
"That was what counted, she told herself: those unexpected moments of appreciation, unanticipated glimpses of beauty or kindness - any of the things that attached us to this world, that made us forget, even for a moment, its pain and its transience."
"The only thing that makes me sad is that I shall be leaving Africa when I die. I love Africa, which is my mother and my father. When I am dead, I shall miss the smell of Africa."
"There is a tidal wave of ignorance, Mma Ramotswe. It is a great tidal wave and it will drown all of us if we are not careful."
"The ordinary people of Africa tended not to have room in their hearts for hatred. They were sometimes foolish, like people anywhere, but they did not bear grudges, as Mr Mandela had shown the world."
"International business, once allowed to stalk uncontrolled, killed the local, the small, the quirky."
"There was a great deal of progress being made, right under their noses, particularly in Africa, and this progress was good. Life was much harder for tyrants than it had been before."
"The previously unloved may find it hard to believe that they are now loved; that is such a miracle, they feel; such a miracle."
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