top of page
.png){kind=small}
"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!"
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Psychology quotes
"My heart broke and my mind opened, tragedy works in a funny way like that ~ what once tore me apart was actually what was setting my truth free."
"Vulnerability + Action + Positive Thinking = Courage."
"I think my dad was so fascinated by this idea because he realizedon some fundamental level that he was not in control of his desires:I think he woke up every morning in his nice house with hardwoodfloors and granite countertops and wondered why he desired granitecountertops and hardwood floors, wondered who precisely wasrunning his life."
"Day or night, good or bad, all things from within."
"People who are two faced, usually forget which mask they are wearing at some point in their life."
"We are who we are because of what we learn and what we remember."
"We are most often inspired and motivated by fallacy rather than logic."
"If we let the drama of others' lives become our own, then we are no longer ourselves. We become the reflections of others' dramas and their lives, their tragedies, and their misfortunes become our own."
"I've always felt that the best whips and chains are in the mind. With a little creativity, the physical ones are hardly necessary."
Explore more quotes by Alexander McCall Smith
"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."
"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."
"She knew that she had a tendency to allow her mind to wander, but surely that's what made the world interesting. One thought led to another, one memory triggered another. How dull it would be, she thought, not to be reminded of the interconnectedness of everything, how dull for the present not to evoke the past, for here not to imply there."
"How often have I noticed or, indeed, listened to him? We talk, but do I actually listen, or is our conversation mainly a question of my waiting for him to stop and for it to be my turn to say something? For how many of us is that what conversation means - the setting up of our lines?"
"Memories of that which we have lost are curious things - weeks, months, even years may pass without recollection of them and then, quite suddenly, something will remind us of a lost friend, or of a favourite possession that has been mislaid or destroyed, and then we think: Yes, that is what I have had and I have no longer."
"So it was in Botswana, almost everywhere; ties of kinship, no matter how attenuated by distance or time, linked one person to another, weaving across the country a human blanket of love and community. And in the fibres of that blanket there were threads of obligation that meant that one could not ignore the claims of others. Nobody should starve; nobody should feel that they were outsiders; nobody should be alone in their sadness."
"That was the trouble with people in general: they were surprisingly unrealistic in their expectations."
bottom of page