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Alexander McCall Smith

"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."

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"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."

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A.E. Samaan

"Some days you live in pajamas, and your hair kind-of has that Albert Einstein look."

Author Name

Personal Development

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A.E. Samaan

"You can either buy clothes or buy pictures," she said. "It's that simple. No one who is not very rich can do both. Pay no attention to your clothes and no attention at all to the mode, and buy your clothes for comfort and durability, and you will have the clothes money to buy pictures."

Author Name

Personal Development

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A.E. Samaan

"The bed is just a decoration in a busy man's bedroom."

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Personal Development

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A.E. Samaan

"Leisure time is when your wife can't find you."

Author Name

Personal Development

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A.E. Samaan

"Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste."

Author Name

Personal Development

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A.E. Samaan

"Luckily, I always travel with a book, just in case I have to wait on line for Santa, or some such inconvenience."

Author Name

Personal Development

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A.E. Samaan

"An indoor man eats nothing, except that which is prepared and served by his mother with lots of insults, an outdoor man eats that which he buys, prepares, served and eaten with lots of respect."

Author Name

Personal Development

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A.E. Samaan

"Never miss day without a walk."

Author Name

Personal Development

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A.E. Samaan

"Our lives are defined by how we spend our time and what we choose to do daily. A life of passion is not an act but a lifestyle."

Author Name

Personal Development

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A.E. Samaan

"The best way to truly live a consistent life of passion is to formulate daily habits and a daily routine that engages you and makes you feel more passionate about life."

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Personal Development

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Alexander McCall Smith
"Men, she thought, were odd about their clothes: they liked to wear the same things until they became defeated and threadbare."

Observation

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Alexander McCall Smith
"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."

Lifestyle

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Alexander McCall Smith
"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."

Ethics

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Alexander McCall Smith
"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."

Society

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Alexander McCall Smith
"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."

Language

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Alexander McCall Smith
"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."

Mind

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Alexander McCall Smith
"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."

Memory

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Alexander McCall Smith
"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."

Society

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Alexander McCall Smith
"That was the trouble with people in general: they were surprisingly unrealistic in their expectations."

Wisdom

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Alexander McCall Smith
"You can go through life and make new friends every year - every month practically - but there was never any substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive into adult years. Those are the ones in which we are bound to one another with hoops of steel."

Relationship

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