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The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Alexander McCall Smith

Alexander McCall Smith

To lose your own language was like forgetting your mother, and as sad, in a way.

language, native-tongue

Alexander McCall Smith

He had been thinking of how landscape moulds a language. It was impossible to imagine these hills giving forth anything but the soft syllables of Irish, just as only certain forms of German could be spoken on the high crags of Europe; or Dutch in the muddy, guttural, phlegmish lowlands.

dutch, german, irish, landscape, language

Alexander McCall Smith

There was no point in telling somebody not to cry, she had always thought; indeed there were times when you should do exactly the opposite, when you should urge people to cry, to start the healing that sometimes only tears can bring. But if there was a place for tears of relief, there might even be a place for tears of pride[.]

crying, healing

Alexander McCall Smith

It was a voice that you felt you had to listen to—or you ignored at your peril.

advice, alexander-mccall-smith, peril, voice, voices

Alexander McCall Smith

When people ask for advice they very rarely want your advice and will go ahead and do what they want to do anyway, no matter what you say. That applied in every sort of case; it was a human truth of universal application, but one which most people knew little or nothing about.

Alexander McCall Smith

She knew as well as anyone that the world could be a place of trial and sorrow, that there was injustice and suffering and heartlessness – there was enough of all that to fill the great Kalahari twice over, but what good did it do to ponder that and that alone? None, she thought.

kalahari, sorrow, suffering

Alexander McCall Smith

If we treated others with the consideration that one would give to those who only had a few days to live, then we would be kinder, at least.

consideration-of-others, kindness

Alexander McCall Smith

It was a good thing to be an African. There were terrible things that happened in Africa, things that brought shame and despair when one thought about them, but that was not all there was in Africa. However great the suffering of the people of Africa, however harrowing the cruelty and chaos brought about by soldiers—small boys with guns, really—there was still so much in Africa from which one could take real pride. There was the kindness, for example, and the ability to smile, and the art and the music.

africa, kindness, suffering

Alexander McCall Smith

. . . there was something that Isabel had said that always stuck in his mind. Remember what you have and the other person doesn’t. It was simple–almost too simple–advice and yet, like all such home advice, it expressed a profound truth.

compassion, kindness

Alexander McCall Smith

And then the second thing you have to do is go and see your son. That is a duty of love, Andrew. It’s as simple as that. A duty of love. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?

ruminative-and-wise, witty

Alexander McCall Smith

Tolerance was like one of those soothing creams—it drew out inflammation, it did away with the pain.

alexander-mccall-smith, healing-the-emotional-self, tolerance

Alexander McCall Smith

It was easy to make a difference to other people’s lives, so easy to change the little room in which people lived their life.