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"Great feuds often need very few words to resolve them. Disputes, even between nations, between peoples, can be set to rest with simple acts of contrition and corresponding forgiveness, can so often be shown to be based on nothing much other than pride and misunderstanding, and the forgetting of the humanity of the other-and land, of course."
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"Some people are like thorns. But you have to let them be thorns, because thorns can't turn into petals. The trick is not letting them prick you; never let a thorn prick you!"

"Those who laugh with you when you laugh are acquaintances, those who cry with you when you cry are companions, and those who do both are friends."

"Behind you, leave your enemies. Beside you, keep your family. Around you, maintain your friends. Within you, cherish God."

"Ok. You fuck me, then snub me. You love me, you hate me. You show me a sensitive side, then you turn into a total asshole. Is this a pretty accurate description of our relationship."

"Man loves pleasure. But women desire purposeful commitment."

"Enemies are often former or potential friends who have been denied - or think that they have been denied - something."

"Behind you, leave your enemies. Beside you, keep your family. Around you, maintain your friends. Within you, treasure God."

"Just because our friendship has changed and now we grow in different directions, does not mean that we have to grow apart."

"I just want one person I can rescue and I want one person who needs me. Who can't live without me. I want to be a hero, but not just one time."

"And someone he scarcely knew moved towards him and knelt beside him and whispered, 'Sir, was you calling out for me? Sir, I know I know,' and touched him."
Explore more quotes by Alexander McCall Smith

"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."

"We chose younger and younger politicians to lead us because they looked good on television and were sharp. But really we should be looking for wisdom, and choosing people who had acquired it; and such people, in general, looked bad on television - gray, lined, thoughtful."

"She believed in getting as much use as possible from everything, and thought that as long as machinery, or anything else, could be cajoled into operation, it should be kept; to do otherwise, she thought, was wasteful."

"Mma Ramotswe tucked the cheque safely away in her bodice. Modern business methods were all very well, she thought, but when it came to the safeguarding of money there were some places which had yet to be bettered."

"I said to him that Zululand sounded fine, but that every man has a map in his heart of his own country and that the heart will never allow you to forget this map."

"It's through the small things that we develop our moral imagination, so that we can understand the sufferings of others."

"However she redefined herself, that part of one that made for the core of the self, that part that we think of as the ultimate, inner being-that was ineradicable Scottish. That part spoke with a Scottish voice; that part looked out through Scottish eyes; and it was that part that now welled within her as she gazed out through the window of the descending plane and saw below her the rolling Borders hills."

"There is faith and faith. One form of faith is actual practice-the rituals and so on-the other form of faith involves actually believing in it."

"She watched him take the trumpet from its case and fit the mouthpiece. She watched as he raised it to his lips and then, so suddenly, from that tiny cup of metal against his flesh, the sound would burst out like a glorious, brilliant knife dividing the air. And the little room would reverberate and the flies, jolted out of their torpor, would buzz round and round as if riding the swirling notes."
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