Top 300 Alexander McCall Smith Quotes (2023 Update)
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101. “So the small things came into their own: small acts of helping others, if one could; small ways of making one’s own life better: acts of love, acts of tea, acts of laughter. Clever people might laugh at such simplicity, but, she asked herself, what was their own solution?”

— Alexander McCall Smith

102. “But don’t we often lie to people we love, or not tell them things, precisely because we love them?”

— Alexander McCall Smith

103. “It’s really rather easy to write eighth-century Chinese poetry,” said Angus Lordie. “In English, of course. It requires little effort, I find.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

104. “The problem, he thought, was that so much humour involved misfortune of one sort or another, and now that same human misfortune was out of bounds – interdicted by self-appointed guardians of sensitivity. There was somebody to be offended by everything, he though, which left little room for laughter.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

105. “We forget, she thought. We think that we were always the way we are now, but we were not. –.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

106. “For that, surely, is what friendship is all about–about the giving of love and the assurance of love.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

107. “I am grateful to you for being who you are: for standing up for ladies with large glasses and a bad skin and for everybody else who has had to battle to get where they have got. And most of all I am grateful to you for being my friend, Mma; I am grateful to you for that. That is the best thing that anybody can be to anybody else – a friend.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

108. “When somebody does wrong, Emma, we must remember that that person is still a human being like the rest of us. We must not rush to throw the first stone. We must remind ourselves that all of us do wrong from time to time, unless we’re saints, which we aren’t.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

109. “Self-pity does not appreciate pedantry.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

110. “It was a pink sort of smell- a smell that seemed to get bigger as you smelled it and then burst, just like the popping of a bubble.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

111. “We do not talk about wise men or wise ladies any more, she reflected; their place had been taken, it seemed, by all sorts of shallow people – actors and the like – who were only too ready to pronounce on all sorts of subjects.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

112. “Now the tea began to do its work- as it always did- and the world that only a few minutes previously had seemed so bleak started to seem less so.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

113. “It is not enough just to identify a problem; there are plenty of people who were very skilled at pointing out what was wrong with the world, but they were not always so adept at working out how these things could be righted.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

114. “Not forgiving was like scratching at a sore to keep the healing scab from forming.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

115. “You simply could not help everybody; but you could at least help those who came into your life.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

116. “People were forever digging up events that had taken place a long time ago. And what was the point in doing this if the effect was merely to poison the present? There were many wrongs in the past, but did it help to keep bringing them up and giving them a fresh airing?”

— Alexander McCall Smith

117. “She felt that she had revealed something to Cat, and with revealing something about oneself there always comes a sense of lightening of the load that we all carry; the load of being ourselves.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

118. “Life consists of positive and negative features, and I think that it is permissible to write about both.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

119. “The telling of a story, like virtually everything in this life, was always made all the easier by a cup of tea.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

120. “It seems to me that we’re in danger of losing sight of certain basic civic values in society by allowing the growth of a whole generation of people who really have no sense of attachment to society.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

121. “And it was young men in red cars who were the most dangerous of all. Such people were best given a wide berth, both in and out of the car.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

122. “Oh I love gadgets and I pride myself on keeping at the cutting edge of technology.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

123. “A nudist? In Edinburgh? Does he realise what parallel we’re on?”

— Alexander McCall Smith

124. “We were tiny creatures, really; tiny and afraid, trying to hold our place on the little platform that was our earth. So while the world about us might seem so solid, so permanent, it was not really. We were all at the mercy of chance, no matter how confident we felt, hostages to our own human frailty.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

125. “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.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

126. “I cannot see myself in a new car. I am a tiny white van person. That is what i want!”

— Alexander McCall Smith

127. “New York is a wonderful place to be up, an awful place to be down.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

128. “Look at every territorial dispute you care to mention. Northern Ireland, for instance.” “Religion in that case,” Jamie ventured. “Not just. Religion was the badge of identity, but it wasn’t really about whether you went to Mass or to a tub-thumping Protestant chapel. It was a result of the movement of people. The Protestant planters – many of them Scots – replaced the native Irish, remember? Movement of people again.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

129. “But we make such mistakes all the time, all through our lives. Wisdom, I suppose, is seeing this and acting upon it before it is too late. But it is often too late, isn’t it? – and those things that we should have said are unsaid, and remain unsaid for ever.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

130. “We like to think that we plan what happens to us, but it is chance, surely, that lies behind so many of the great events of our lives – the meeting with the person with whom we are destined to spend the rest of our days, the receiving of a piece of advice whic influences our choice of career, the spotting of a particular house for sale; all of these may be put down to pur chance, and yet they govern how our lives work out and how happy – or unhappy – we were going to be.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

131. “Why? Why is there a crisis in literature? Because of lies and rottenness. Simplicity and sincerity have been replaced by obsfucation and pretense. Men, of course. They love to create mystery where none exists. It’s the way they think.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

132. “You can’t do much about a personality disorder. Cats are psychopaths at heart.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

133. “We think that we can fix our lives by taking some simple step, but it’s not like that. Most problems need lots of sticking plasters. They need coaxing and massaging and looking at from all sorts of different angles.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

134. “It’s a different sort of love taht puts up with illness. Old love.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

135. “She shook her head. What was the point of anger? There were occasions when Mma Ramotswe, like all of us, could feel angry, but they were few – and they never lasted long. Anger, Obed Ramotswe had explained to her once, is no more than a salt that we rub into our wounds. She had never forgotten that – along with the things he said about cattle, and Botswana, and the behaviour of the rains.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

136. “His life was unrecorded; who is there to write down the lives of ordinary people?”

— Alexander McCall Smith

137. “She looked down. He had clasped his hands together, his fingers interlaced. It was a gesture, she thought, of unequivocal pleasure – pleasure at hearing what all of us wanted to hear at least occasionally: that there was somebody who liked us, whatever our faults, and liked us sufficiently to say so.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

138. “Places had echoes- and if one were sensitive, one might just pick up some resonance from the past, some feeling for what had happened.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

139. “Make a list of what you know, what you don’t know, and what you’d like to know. Make a list of possible outcomes. Choose the outcome you think is best, then go for that!”

— Alexander McCall Smith

140. “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.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

141. “A flaky skin was particularly bad if you were a criminal, she had read, as it meant that you left a great deal of DNA at the scene of the crime. That had amused her. That would teach any flaky-skinned housebreakers to burgle people’s houses. “You really need to do something about your skin,” the police might say to such people when they arrested them.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

142. “The people with the strong, brave exteriors are just as weak and vulnerable as the rest of us. And of course they never admit to their childish practices, their moments of weakness or absurdity, and then the rest of us think that’s how it should be.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

143. “I have three older sisters, so we were a reasonably large family and, in general, a happy one.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

144. “When there is nothing you can do to stop the march of adverse events, then the best thing, she felt, was to get on with life and not to worry.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

145. “She would give him the benefit of the doubt, as she always did: her experience had taught her that the names we gave to others, and the things we accused them of, often said more about us than they did about them.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

146. “If you take God out of it, then right and justice become small, human things. And weak things too.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

147. “As a writer I’ve learned certain lessons. One of them is to be careful about how you put a view, and to bear in mind how easily and readily you’ll be misinterpreted.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

148. “Make sure that the road is always clear for your enemy to leave’?”

— Alexander McCall Smith

149. “Perhaps this was a concomitant of freedom: if people were free, then some of them, at least, would be free of the constraints of good taste. Perhaps.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

150. “Painters aren’t expected to paint bleak pictures, are they?”

— Alexander McCall Smith