Top 300 Alexander McCall Smith Quotes (2023 Update)
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251. “The only thing that makes me sad is that I shall be leaving Africa when I die. I love Africa, which is my mother and my father. When I am dead, I shall miss the smell of Africa.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

252. “All our human endeavours are like that, she reflected, and it is only because we are too ignorant to realize it, or are too forgetful to remember it, that we have the confidence to build something that is meant to last.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

253. “I enjoy women’s conversation, and I think that helps me to describe them in fiction.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

254. “We needed resentment, he said, as it was resentment which identified and underlined the wrong. Without these reactive attitudes, we ran the risk of diminishing our sense of right and wrong, because we could end up thinking it just doesn’t matter.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

255. “If you are there to staunch the tears of the world, then it does not cross your mind that you yourself may weep.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

256. “Life happens, she thought; whatever we do, life just happens.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

257. “Every small wrong, every minor act of cruelty, every act of petty bullying was symbolic of a greater wrong. And if we ignored these small things, then did it not blunt our outrage over the larger wrongs?”

— Alexander McCall Smith

258. “There are so many people who would love to be able to live in peace, but there are so many others who do not want to let them. Mr.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

259. “He tilted his hat back slightly, so that he could see the sky more clearly. It was so empty, so dizzying in its height, so unconcerned by the man who was crossing a field beneath it, and thinking as he did so.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

260. “If you knew what is was like to be another person, then how could you possibly do something which would cause pain? The problem, though, was that there seemed to be people in whom that imaginative part was just missing. It could be that they were born that way – with something missing from their brains – or it could be that they became like that because they were never taught by their parents to sympathise with others.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

261. “Well, that’s the important thing, isn’t it, Mma? To feel happiness, and then to remember it.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

262. “I am easily persuaded to continue to have fun.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

263. “The Morning After Coffee Bar was different from the mass-produced coffee bars that had mushroomed on every street almost everywhere, a development which presaged the flattening effects of globalisation; the spreading, under a cheerful banner, of a sameness that threatened to weaken and destroy all sense of place.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

264. “It is the onion, memory, that makes me cry,” he said.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

265. “You can’t go through life saying “I hate mustard” because that is shutting off the possibility of change.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

266. “No matter what precautions were taken, socks disappeared into a Bermuda Triangle for socks, a swirling vortex that swallowed one sock at a time, leaving its partner stranded.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

267. “She had always believed that people who were nasty or unkind to others were only like that because there was something wrong in their lives, and that people who had something wrong in their lives were not to be despised or hated, but were to be pitied. So.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

268. “There are many more kind people than not-so-kind people,” said Mma Ramotswe.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

269. “Eating with others was different from just talking to them – it was an act of commitment, a recognition of shared humanity. We all share these physical needs, it said; we are brothers and sisters in our vulnerability.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

270. “Sometimes it was difficult to be as tolerant as he wanted to be; but then, thought Ulf, the whole point about high ideals is that they are high. Being Swedish was not always easy, but you had to do your best, and hope that you didn’t slip, and become... well, Mediterranean in outlook.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

271. “And God was here anyway, before the missionaries came. We called him by a different name, then, and he did not live over at the Jews’ place; he lived here in Africa, in the rocks, in the sky, in places where we knew he liked to be.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

272. “Plenty of people were writing novels; in fact, if one did a survey in the street, half of Edinburgh was writing a novel, and this meant that there really weren’t enough characters to go round. Unless, of course, one wrote about people who were themselves writing novels. And what would the novels that these fictional characters were writing be about? Well, they would be novels about people writing novels.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

273. “People talk of the wrench of parting, and that, he felt, was exactly what it was. Take a metal object off a magnet and one would experience that – there was the draw, the tug, the flow of the bond even through the air, and then the sudden detaching as separation occurred. That was what it was like. That was human parting. You felt it; you felt the separation, just as you would feel the rending of tissue being pulled apart.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

274. “But we cannot always choose whose lives will become entangled with our own; these things happen to us, come to us uninvited, and Mma Ramotswe understood that well.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

275. “I’m saying that forgiveness is like the rain. That’s all I’m saying. It makes things better. Rain does that too.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

276. “Lists, she thought, are the stories of our lives; they give a picture of who we are and what we do every day. The.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

277. “If she was going to remain an engaged lady, then she would make the most of it, and one of the ways to do this would be to enjoy her free time.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

278. “I write four or five a books a year. That means that I usually have one on the go. I am fortunate in being able to write quickly – 1000 words an hour.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

279. “There were few other passengers: a man in an overcoat, his head sunk against his chest; a couple with arms around each other, impervious to their surroundings; and a teenage boy with a black scarf wound round his neck, Zorro-style. Isabel smiled to herself: a microcosm of our condition, she thought. Loneliness and despair; love and its self-absorption; and sixteen, which was a state all its own.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

280. “She had never been able to tolerate dishonesty, which she thought threatened the very heart of relationships between people. If you could not count on other people to mean what they said, or to do what they said they would do, then life could become utterly unpredictable. The fact that we could trust one another made it possible to undertake the simple tasks of life.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

281. “You are a lucky lady to be marrying a man who can fix things. Most husbands just break things.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

282. “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.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

283. “And she lowered her eyes at the gentle reproach, for she had learned her lesson, even if there would be occasional, but only very occasional, relapses; for none of us is perfect, except, of course, the ones we love, the things of home, our much appreciated dogs and cats, our favourites of one sort or another.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

284. “But please be careful – and never, never think that you are justified in doing something wrong just because you are trying to do something right.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

285. “Lions walk on four legs,” observed Mma Makutsi. “Was this man walking on four legs? That can be a big giveaway, Mma.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

286. “Very few people imagine their own future accurately. And then they’re often pleasantly surprised.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

287. “The night is a very bad time for questions to which there are no answers.” Mr Badule looked at her. “You are very right, my sister. There is.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

288. “Telling a person with toothache that there are others with greater toothache than their own was no help at all.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

289. “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. Snakes were one of the tests which life sent for us, and there was no telling how we might respond until the moment arrived. Snakes and men. These were the things sent to try women, and the outcome was not always what we might want it to be.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

290. “Who can’t like pigs? They’re wonderful creatures! I’ve always liked pigs.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

291. “Do not take on a traditionally built person unless you are prepared for a heavyweight bout.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

292. “The good were worthy of note because they battled and that battle was a great story, whereas the evil were evil because of moral laziness, or weakness, and that was ultimately a dull and uninteresting affair.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

293. “All suspects should be given the chance to telephone their lawyers or their mothers, and it would not be surprising if they chose to call their mothers. After all, your mother is fall more likely to believe in your innocence than your lawyer.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

294. “Words that are full of hurt sometimes need to be left in the air where they have been spoken.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

295. “I suppose that’s the way affairs come to an end. Somebody grabs a fork and stabs the other in the hand. And that’s it.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

296. “Leave them,” said Isabel. “Jamie can iron them himself. It’s very therapeutic for men to iron. Therapeutic for women, that is.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

297. “Mrs. Moffat had taken her hand, for comfort, and they had sat there in silence for a while. Sometimes it seemed as if the world itself was broken, that there was something wrong with all of us, something broken in such a way that it might not be put together again; but the holding of hands, human hand in human hand, could help, could make the world seem less broken.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

298. “It was a good place to sit, and listen, under a sky that had seen so much and heard so much that one more wicked deed would surely make no difference. Sins, thought Mma Ramotswe, are darker and more powerful when contemplated within confining walls. Out in the open, under such a sky as this, misdeeds were reduced to their natural proportions – small, mean things that could be faced quite openly, sorted, and folded away.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

299. “As a writer, I have readers who will have a range of political views. I don’t think they look to me for political guidance.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

300. “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.”

— Alexander McCall Smith