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"The language of Cat's generation was far harder than that of her own, and more pithily correct: in their terms, he was a hunk. But why, she wondered, should anybody actually want a hunk, when non-hunks were so much more interesting?"
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Exlpore more Perspective quotes
"The wealth of time is the only wealth that is more valuable than human resources."
"It's good to look at life from the bottom up so you can see that things have risen above what they once were."
"You can look at the world from a mountain or from a rat hole! Most people do the second!"
"A muddied diamond is better than an unsullied pebble."
"The Protestants teachings affected the view of the populace to work."
"It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos, for man was always small compared to the nearest tree."
"We have a choice. We can be jaded by what we've lost, or joyous over what that thing had accomplished while we had it."
"It is good to focus, but never forget to look around. If you focus on the wrong target, you may miss seeing all of the beauty around you."
"Write it as you see in your own perspective, you may be right or wrong but then what, that's how you see it."
"Life is full of beauty, when we focus on the bliss of being."
Explore more quotes by Alexander McCall Smith
"We live in a culture of complaint because everyone is always looking for things to complain about. It's all tied in with the desire to blame others for misfortunes and to get some form of compensation into the bargain."
"Perhaps trust had to be accompanied by a measure of common sense, and a hefty dose of realism about human nature. But that would need a lot of thinking about, and the tea break did not go on forever."
"But he'll never be fully recognised, because Scots literature these days is all about complaining and moaning and being injured in one's soul."
"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."
"Bertie stared at his mother. She spoils things, he thought. All she ever does is spoil things. He had not started this conversation, and it was not his fault that they were now talking about Grey Owl. He sounded rather a nice man to Bertie. Any why should he not dress up in feathers and live in the forests if that was what he wanted to do? It was typical of his mother to try to spoil Grey Owl's fun."
"When people ask for advice they very rarely want your advice and will go ahead and do what they want to do anyway, no matter what you say. That applied in every sort of case; it was a human truth of universal application, but one which most people knew little or nothing about."
"Did it make a difference if the remark never got back to the person about whom it was made? She thought not. The harm is done when the words are uttered: that is the act of belittlement, the act of diminishing the other, and it is that act which would cause pain to the victim. You said that about me? The wrong was located in the making of the cruel remark, rather than in the pain it might later cause."
"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."
"He had been thinking of how landscape moulds a language. It was impossible to imagine these hills giving forth anything but the soft syllables of Irish, just as only certain forms of German could be spoken on the high crags of Europe; or Dutch in the muddy, guttural, phlegmish lowlands."
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