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"She brought a chair into the room and placed it alongside the top of his bed. Then she held his hand as he drifted off to sleep. It was so small in her own hand, and it felt warm and dry. She pressed his hand gently, and his fingers returned the pressure, but only just, as he was almost asleep by then. She remembered, but not very well, what it was to fall asleep holding the hand of another; how precious such an experience, how fortunate those to whom it was vouchsafed by the gods of Friendship, or of Love. She thought she had forgotten that, but now she remembered."
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"If you take a stand [for God] and mean it, you may suffer persecution. Some of your friends will drift away. They don't want to be with people like you. You speak to their conscience. They feel uncomfortable in your presence because you live for God."
"Our relationship must be right with God before it can be right with man."
"Was Deirdre right about me purposely wanting relationships that were impossible?"
"Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal."
"Go! Yes, You! Go! I will not force you to like me; I will not force you to love me. Unconditional love has a condition inside it but there is no you in me. If I know my real me, then I know your real you. I know your value in me and I also know my value in you. If your value is not in me and my value is not in you, then I will not force you to like me; I will not force you to love me, so go!"
"Things had improved after he was born. We both loved him with such fervor that it was impossible that some wouldn't splash back on us."
"A relationship is the union of two psychological systems."
"To get someone's attentionsay three words with compassion.Say "I love you", more than me,like the river loves the sea."
"When I'm with you,I feel exposed.Naked. When I'm naked with you, I feel clothed.Sheltered."
Explore more quotes by Alexander McCall Smith
"We can't have moral obligations to every single person in this world. We have moral obligations to those who we come up against, who enter into our moral space, so to speak. That means neighbors, people we deal with, and so on."
"Mma Ramotswe reflected on how easy it was to find oneself committed to a course of action simply because one lacked the courage to say no."
"Go to any small village anywhere in the world, and see what they remember. Everything. It's all there -- passed on like a precious piece of information, some secret imparted from one who knew to one who yearns to know. Taken good care of."
"What we have, we all must lose-that applied to everything, even to that which we thought we had the greatest right. We were tenants of this earth-nothing more."
"We shall change all that...because it is possible to change the world, if one is determined enough, and if one sees with sufficient clarity just what has to be changed."
"There was no point in telling somebody not to cry, she had always thought; indeed there were times when you should do exactly the opposite, when you should urge people to cry, to start the healing that sometimes only tears can bring. But if there was a place for tears of relief, there might even be a place for tears of pride."
"Mr Mandela, who had given his whole life for justice and had never once thought of himself. How unlike these people were modern politicians, who thought only of power and tricks."
"Matthew knew that phrenology was nonsense, and yet, years later, he found himself making judgments similar to those made by his father; slippery people looked slippery; they really did. And how we become like our parents! How their scorned advice - based, we felt in our superiority, on prejudiced 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!"
"She would not allow herself to remember how Note had treated her, and many others too, she suspected. She had forgiven him, yes, but she still did not like to remember. And perhaps a deliberate act of forgetting went along with forgiveness. You forgave, and then you said to yourself: Now I shall forget. Because if you did not forget, then your forgiveness would be tested, perhaps many times and in ways that you could not resist, and you might go back to anger, and to hating."
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