Top 350 Alexander McCall Smith Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 6 of 8

251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

267. “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

268. “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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

270. “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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

281. “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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

283. “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

284. “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

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. “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

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

291. “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

292. “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

293. “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

294. “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

295. “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

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

298. “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

299. “You must not think that because one thing happens after another thing, then it is the first thing that causes the second thing. You must not think that, because it might not be true.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

300. “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