Alexander McCall Smith
The telling of a story, like virtually everything in this life, was always made all the easier by a cup of tea.Collection: Tea
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.Collection: Life
Most people want nothing to happen. That is the problem with governments these days. They want to do things all the time; they are always very busy thinking of what things they can do next. That is not what people want. People want to be left alone to look after their cattle.Collection: Gratitude
Gracious acceptance is an art - an art which most never bother to cultivate. We think that we have to learn how to give, but we forget about accepting things, which can be much harder than giving.... Accepting another person's gift is allowing him to express his feelings for you.Collection: Art
Be content with who you are and where you are, and do whatever you can do to bring to others such contentment, and joy, and understanding that you have managed to find yourself.Collection: Joy
A life without stories would be no life at all. And stories bound us, did they not, one to another, the living to the dead, people to animals, people to the land?Collection: Life
There is room in history for all of us.Collection: Rooms
The Culture of Complaint... 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.Collection: Desire
Regular maps have few surprises: their contour lines reveal where the Andes are, and are reasonably clear. More precious, though, are the unpublished maps we make ourselves, of our city, our place, our daily world, our life; those maps of our private world we use every day; here I was happy, in that place I left my coat behind after a party, that is where I met my love; I cried there once, I was heartsore; but felt better round the corner..., things of that sort, our personal memories, that make the private tapestry of our lives.Collection: Memories
I see no point in being despondent. We might as well enjoy ourselves during our brief tenure of this life.Collection: Might
How many of us are happy to be exactly where we are at any moment?...only the completely happy think that they are in the correct place.Collection: Thinking
We don't forget.... Our heads may be small, but they are as full of memories as the sky may sometimes be full of swarming bees, thousands and thousands of memories, of smells, of places, of little things that happened to us and which came back, unexpectedly, to remind us who we are.Collection: Memories
Everything has been something before.Collection: Has Beens
They're very beautiful, aren't they? Clouds are very beautiful and yet so often we fail to appreciate them properly. We should do that. We should look at them and think about how lucky we are to have them.Collection: Beautiful
None of us knows how we will cope with snakes until the moment arises, and then most of us find out that we do not do it very well.Collection: Snakes
It was time to take the pumpkin out of the pot and eat it. In the final analysis, that was what solved these big problems of life. You could think and think and get nowhere, but you still had to eat your pumpkin. That brought you down to earth. That gave you a reason for going on. Pumpkin.Collection: Thinking
Talking about pumpkins doesn't make them grow.Collection: Talking
We think the world is ours forever, but we are little more than squatters.Collection: Thinking
And how we become like our parents! How their scorned advice - based, we felt in our superiority, on prejudices 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!Collection: Mother
There is plenty of work for love to do.Collection: Plenty
The point about love, the essential point, was that we loved what we loved. We did not choose. We just loved.Collection: Love
Small things may be important to us; to be a sometime anything is sometimes something.Collection: Important
It is sometimes easier to be happy if you don't know everything.Collection: Happiness
If your ceiling should fall down, then you have lost a room, but gained a courtyard. Think of it that way.Collection: Fall
I have always taken the view that one should never hold against a man anything he says after twelve o'clock at night or after a glass or two of anything.Collection: Taken
[Edinburgh] is a city of shifting light, of changing skies, of sudden vistas. A city so beautiful it breaks the heart again and again.Collection: Beautiful
She was made for untidy rooms and rumpled beds.Collection: Sex
The problem, of course, was that people did not seem to understand the difference between right and wrong. They needed to be reminded about this, because if you left it to them to work out for themselves, they would never bother. They would just find out what was best for them, and then they would call that the right thing. That's how most people thought.Collection: Differences
Old friends, like old shoes, are comfortable. But old shoes, unlike old friends, tend not to be supportive: it is easier to stumble and sprain an ankle while wearing a pair of old shoes than it is in new shoes, with their less yielding leather.Collection: New Shoes
Our minds can come up with the most entertaining possibilities, if we let them. But most of the time, we keep them under far too close a check.Collection: Mind
We all know that it is women who take the decisions, but we have to let men think that the decisions are theirs. It is an act of kindness on the part of women.Collection: Kindness
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.Collection: Love
When you allow people to do what they wish, then that is what they do. They stop doing the things they need to do.Collection: People
At night we are all strangers, even to ourselves.Collection: Night
Lou knew that joy unshared was a halved emotion, just as sadness and loss, when borne alone, were often doubled.Collection: Sadness
Everybody has friends they dislike; people who they have slipped into relationships with, people they would not have chosen had they been more cautious, more circumspect.Collection: People
And that, in a way, was the burden of being a philosopher: one knew what one had to do, but it was so often the opposite of what one really wanted to do.Collection: Opposites
Well, Id say all of us are a combination of moods and emotions. In my day to day life I dont go around skipping, but at times one can feel sheer exhilarating joy at the world.Collection: Joy
Dogs are in on our human silliness; lions are not.Collection: Dog
It would be wonderful to have a guru; it would be like having a social worker or a personal trainer, not that people who had either of these necessarily appreciated the advice they received.Collection: People
But you cannot expect every writer to dwell on human suffering. I think my books do deal with grave issues. People who say they are too positive probably havent read them.Collection: Book
Do you realise that people die of boredom in London suburbs? It's the second biggest cause of death amongs the English in general. Sheer boredom...Collection: Boredom
I am often thanked by people for inventing the term traditionally built. The people who give me thanks for this are often traditionally built themselves.Collection: People
But don't we often lie to people we love, or not tell them things, precisely because we love them?Collection: Love
It was easy to be moral when that was the way you felt anyway. The hard bit about morality was making yourself feel the opposite of what you really felt.Collection: Opposites
Self-pity does not appreciate pedantry.Collection: Self
There was a distinction between lying and telling half-truths, but it was a very narrow one.Collection: Lying
I cannot see myself in a new car. I am a tiny white van person. That is what i want!Collection: White