Top 300 Alexander McCall Smith Quotes (2023 Update)
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201. “Love was like rain; there could be periods of drought when it seemed that love would never return, would never make its presence felt again. In such times, the heart could harden, but then, just as droughts broke, so too could love suddenly appear, and heal just as quickly and completely as rain can heal the parched land.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

202. “For each of us, she thought, there is out completeness in another. Whether we find it, or it finds us, or it eludes all finding is a matter of moral luck.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

203. “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.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

204. “You have to leave your heart to get on with it. It’s rather like breathing. We don’t have to remind ourselves to breathe.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

205. “We are all sent the dreams we yearn for, she thought; no matter how unhappy or fraught our waking world may be, we are sent dreams in which we can do the things the heart really wants us to do.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

206. “Whisky nosers, as they called themselves, eschewed what they saw as the pretentiousness of wine vocabulary. While oenophiles resorted to recondite adjectives, whisky nosers spoke the language of everyday life, detecting hints of stale seaweed, or even diesel fuel.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

207. “We’ve all had that sort of experience,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Every one of us, Mma. We’ve all had a first day at school, or a first day in a new job. We’ve all been unsure what to do.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

208. “There are some people who start off knowing very little about the world and end up years later knowing even less. Never underestimate the capacity of the human mind for ignorance.” Mr. Woodhouse found this very amusing.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

209. “We were, when all was said and done, children lost in the wood, and to break into tears was the most understandable of reactions, the most quintessentially human one too.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

210. “It is such an easy thing to do – to touch another in sympathy – but it is such a hard thing too.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

211. “To be cut down to size is good for all of us, but particularly so for those who forget how transient are our cultures and institutions, how pointless and cruel our divisions, how vain our claims to special status for our practices and beliefs above those of others.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

212. “Everybody who consulted her was, in their way, hurting – even this rich man with his big Mercedes-Benz and his expensive cuff-links. Human hurt was like lightning; it did not choose its targets, but struck, with rough equality and little regard to position, achievement, or moral desert.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

213. “The trouble with Grace, she thought, is that she is so literal. But that was the trouble with most people, when it came down to it; there were very few who enjoyed flights of fantasy, and to have that sort of mind – one which enjoyed dry with and understood the absurd – left one in a shrinking minority.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

214. “Auden returns to one of his most important themes – that of repairing the tragic division in our lives, of making us whole again: While, as they lie in the grass of our neglect, So many long-forgotten objects Revealed by his undisclosed shining Are returned to us and made precious again; Games we thought we must drop as we grew up, Little noises we dared not laugh at, Faces we made when no one was looking. But he wishes us more than this.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

215. “French philosophers had been able to admire Mao and his works because they did not have to live in China at the time.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

216. “Mma Ramotsew accepted her large slice of cake and looked at the rich fruit within it. There were at least seven hundred calories in that, she thought, but it did not matter; she was a traditionally built lady and she did not have to worry about such things.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

217. “But he’ll never be fully recognised, because Scots literature these days is all about complaining and moaning and being injured in one’s soul.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

218. “I’ve also long since realized that the way to really engage children is to give out prizes; it’s amazing how it concentrates their minds.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

219. “The previously unloved may find it hard to believe that they are now loved; that is such a miracle, they feel; such a miracle.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

220. “Moral beauty existed as clearly as any other form of beauty and perhaps that was where we could find the God who was so vividly, and sometimes bizarrely, described in our noisy religious explanations. It was an intriguing thought, as it meant that a concert could be a spiritual experience, a secular painting a religious icon, a beguiling face a passing angel.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

221. “As a child she had believed that wrongs would always be righted, that somehow the world would not let the innocent suffer, but now she realised that this was not true. Old oppressors were replaced by new ones, from another distant place or from right next door. Old lies were replaced by new ones, backed up by old threats.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

222. “He thought of all the ways that so many people felt about life. Life was a matter of regret – how could it be anything else? We knew that we would lose the things we loved; we knew that sooner or later we would lose everything, and beyond that was a darkness, a state of non-being that we found hard to imagine, let alone accept.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

223. “The young rarely believe that they will not be able to get what they want, because there is always an open future.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

224. “Our possessing of our world is a temporary matter: we stamp our ownership upon our surroundings, give familiar names to the land about us, erect statues of ourselves, but all of this is swept away, so quickly, so easily. We think the world is ours for ever, but we are little more than squatters.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

225. “He took a deep breath. ‘To marry me,’ he said quietly. It was easier than he thought. Icarus did not fall from the sky; the ground did not open; the earth did not wobble on its trajectory.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

226. “In such a way is freedom of thought lost... By small cuts. By small acts of disapproval. By a thousand discouragements of spirit.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

227. “It is very difficult sometimes to keep upright.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

228. “When you are with somebody you love the smallest, smallest things can be so important, so amusing because love transforms the world, everything. And was that what had happened?”

— Alexander McCall Smith

229. “We need to believe I think in justice. We need to run our lives as if justice existed. If we abandon a belief that justice will eventually be done, we make this world much more difficult for ourselves.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

230. “That was what counted, she told herself: those unexpected moments of appreciation, unanticipated glimpses of beauty or kindness – any of the things that attached us to this world, that made us forget, even for a moment, its pain and its transience.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

231. “That young man will go far, she said. I don’t know in what direction, but he will go far.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

232. “Insincerity had never come easily to her, but good manners required it on occasion, even if a superhuman effort was needed.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

233. “Many of my books are written from a female perspective. I rather enjoy the take that women have on the world, and certainly I enjoy the conversations that women have.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

234. “Any author of fiction will tell you that characters don’t need to be told what to do.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

235. “If people came at you and started to scratch you, then of course you had the right to sit on them.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

236. “What else do you need in life, Mma? You have a fine husband – which is one of the most important things that anybody can have.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

237. “There was a distinction between lying and telling half-truths, but it was a very narrow one.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

238. “I’m very interested in tea. I wouldn’t mind being involved in some aspect of the tea industry.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

239. “Already many of the memories of the previous two weeks had faded: the smell of that small hotel in St. Andrews; that mixture of bacon cooking for breakfast and the lavender-scented soap in the bathroom; the air from the sea drifing across the golf course; the aroma of coffee in the coffee bar in South Street. She should have noted them down. She should have said something about all that and the light and the hills with sheep on them like small white stones.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

240. “Everybody was a potential assailant; nobody spoke to one another for fear of being misinterpreted; nobody comforted another, put an arm around a shoulder-to do so would be to invite accusation.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

241. “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.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

242. “It was curious how some people had a highly developed sense of guilt, she thought, while others had none. Some people would agonise over minor slips or mistakes on their part, while others would feel quite unmoved by their own gross acts of betrayal or dishonesty.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

243. “Believe me, there’s nothing more brittle than human beauty. Encounter it. Savour it, by all means. Then watch how it turns to dust.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

244. “I’m interested in character and dialogue and exchange of ideas.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

245. “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.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

246. “And he thought for a moment how stupid our society had become, that its nanny-like concern for risk should prevent one man helping another to take a dead friend up the steps.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

247. “You haven’t offended me at all. You’ve made me think. That’s all.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

248. “When Emma was five, Mrs. Woodhouse died. Emma did not remember her mother. She remembered love, though, and a feeling of warmth. It was like remembering light, or the glow that sometimes persists after a light has gone out.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

249. “When we dismiss or deny the hopes of others, she thought, we forget that they, like us, have only one chance in this life.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

250. “If we let the men talk about them and decide them, then suddenly we wake up and find out that the men have made all the decisions, and these decisions all suit men.”

— Alexander McCall Smith