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"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."
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"Causes for attachment are created at the very time abhorrence occurs. Familiarity (acquaintance) up to a certain point will result in attachment and if it reaches 'ridge point' & goes past further, it will result in abhorrence."

"Jealousy is love in competition."

"Belikov is a sick, evil man who should be thrown into a pit of rabid vipers for the great offense he commited against you this morning.""Thank you." I said primly. Then, I considered. "Can vipers be rabid?""I don't see why not. Everything can be. I think. Canadian geese might be worse than vipers, though.""Canadian geese are deadlier than vipers?""You ever try to feed those little bastards? They're vicious. You get thrown to vipers, you die quickly. But the geese? That'll go on for days. More suffering.""Wow. I don't know whether I should be impressed or frightened that you've thought about all of this."

"You want things to remain the same, which they never can, and so you're wounded by your own feelings & resentful others don't seem to care..."

"I realised I got anxious because my true aspiration wasn't to become the chief of a multi-billion dollar, multi-national company that created widgets or some shit."
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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