It is sometimes easier to be happy if you don't know everything.
She was made for untidy rooms and rumpled beds.
We all know that it is women who make 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.
The telling of a story, like virtually everything in this life, was always made all the easier by a cup of tea.
That of all people, it should be him; that took her aback. That the heart should settle on somebody like him; that surprised her. But she was so certain about it, so certain.
Be content with who you are and where you are, and do whatever you can do to bring to others such contentment, and joy, and understanding that you have managed to find yourself.
Do not act meanly, do not be unkind, because the time for setting things right may pass before your heart changes course. Isabel Dalhousie
A life without stories would be no life at all. And stories bound us, did they not, one to another, the living to the dead, people to animals, people to the land?
But don't we often lie to people we love, or not tell them things, precisely because we love them?
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Every man has a map in his heart of his own country and that the heart will never allow you to forget this map. (p. 18)
...great things may come from moments of nothingness.
There are many women whose lives would be immeasurably improved by widowhood, but one should not always point that out.
If your ceiling should fall down, then you have lost a room, but gained a courtyard. Think of it that way.
There is room in history for all of us.
There is plenty of work for love to do.
I am just a tiny person in Africa, but there is a place for me, and for everybody, to sit down on this earth and touch it and call it their own.
Traditional Botswana men like ladies who are more traditionally shaped. You and I, Mma. We remind men of how things used to be in Botswana before these modern-shaped ladies started to get men all confused.
The previously unloved may find it hard to believe that they are now loved; that is such a miracle, they feel; such a miracle.
Special things have a way of surviving.
You are a lucky lady to be marrying a man who can fix things. Most husbands just break things.
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.
Do you realise that people die of boredom in London suburbs? It's the second biggest cause of death amongs the English in general. Sheer boredom...
Sorry about your sausage dog.
We should be careful of the insults we fling at others, lest they return and land at our feet, newly minted to apply to those who had first coined them.
There was a distinction between lying and telling half-truths, but it was a very narrow one.
How many of us are happy to be exactly where we are at any moment?...only the completely happy think that they are in the correct place.
This was a townscape raised in the teeth of cold winds from the east; a city of winding cobbled streets and haughty pillars; a city of dark nights and candlelight, and intellect.
If more women were in power, they wouldn't let wars break out," she said. "Women can't be bothered with all this fighting. We see war for what it is- a matter of broken bodies and crying mothers.
The point about love, the essential point, was that we loved what we loved. We did not choose. We just loved.
This is a city of shifting light, of changing skies, of sudden vistas. A city so beautiful it breaks the heart again and again.
Women are the ones who knows what's going on,' she said quietly . 'They are the ones with eyes. Have you not heard of Agatha Christie?
People stuck by others for years and years, in the face of all odds, and it should be relief, not disbelief, that one felt on witnessing it.
She's sociopathic. She will have no moral compunction in doing whatever is in her interests. It's as simple as that.
We shall change all that...because it is possible to change the world, if one is determined enough, and if one sees with sufficient clarity just what has to be changed.
Sometimes she thought that the people overseas had no room in their heart for Africa, because nobody had ever told them that African people were just the same as they were
If you take God out of it, then right and justice become small, human things. And weak things too.
Everybody knows, she thought, that we have a skeleton underneath our skin; there's no reason to show it
Boys, men," she said. "They're all the same. They think that this [their manhood] is something special and they're all so proud of it. They do not know how ridiculous it is.
There was nothing more unattractive than narcissism, she thought: nothing could transform beauty into a cloying, unattractive quality than that self-conscious appreciation of self.
The danger, of course, is that we spend time imagining that we would be happier elsewhere, and forget to cultivate happiness where fate has placed us.
...the thought crossed her mind that a bed was really a very strange thing-a human nest, really, where our human fragility made its nightly demands for comfort and cosseting
It was a pointed sigh, as sighs sometimes are, not one cast into the air to evaporate, but one calculated to descend, precisely and with great effect, on a target.
Isabel saw the intimacy of the gestures and felt immediately empty, a sensation so physical and so overwhelming that she felt for a moment that she might stop breathing, being empty of air
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?
International business, once allowed to stalk uncontrolled, killed the local, the small, the quirky.
That, said Isabel, is the most painful feature of lost love. you wonder what the other person is doing. Right at this moment. What is he/she doing?
There was no need for words, for there are times when words can only hint at what the heart would wish to say.
No plaque reminds the passer-by of these glories, although there should be one; for those who invent biscuits bring great pleasure to many.
Myth could be as sustaining as reality - sometimes even more so.
It's a different sort of love taht puts up with illness. Old love.
There was so much suffering in Africa that it was tempting just to shrug your shoulders and walk away. But you can't do that, she thought. You just can't.
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.
There were two classes of persons upon whom a duty of virtually absolute confidentiality rested: doctors and lovers.
...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. - Precious Ramotswe
Tea, for me, is one of the great subjects. It is a romatic trade, it does not pollute excessively, it has all sorts of health benefits, it calms and wakes you up at the same time.
...because love can come, if you believe in it and behave as if it exists. That was the case, too, with free will; with perhaps, fath of any sort; and love was a sort of faith, was it not?
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.
It was easy to be moral when that was the way you felt anyway. The hard bit about morality was making yourself feel the opposite of what you really felt.
We never realise how transparent we are.
How remarkable it was, she thought, that we managed to anchor ourselves at all in this world, and that we did so by giving ourselves names and linking those names with places and other people.
Nobody went to bed at seven in Paris, even French children. Les enfants stayed up late at night, he had heard, eating with the adults, sipping red wine, and discussing the latest books and films.
I told him that if a man is born in a dry place, then although he may dream of rain, he does not want too much, and that he will not mind the sun that beats down and down.
It just did not make sense; unless, of course, as she had suggested, we all have a weak point, an area of intellectual or emotional vulnerability that may be quite out of keeping with out character.
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.
Brother Fox looked in. He saw two people. He saw them raise their glasses of wine to him, liquid that for him was suspended in the air, as if by a miracle.
...is under active consideration.
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.
Talking about pumpkins doesn't make them grow.
I think that the measure of whether a life has been a good one is how much love there has been in that life--love both given and received.
Everything is possible in love. In the heart of each of us there can be many rooms, and sometimes there are.
Distant wrongs, she thought: an interesting issue in moral philosophy. Do past wrongs seem less wrong to us simply because they are less vivid?
You simply could not help everybody; but you could at least help those who came into your life.
The new lover, of a few weeks standing, may seem more precious than friends of decades.
You cannot make somebody love something. They must have love in their heart first.
That's the curious thing about love, isn't it? It makes very ordinary things seem special. It makes them seem so much more valuable than they really are.
...has it ever occurred to people that love at first sight might be the rule rather than the exception? How many people fall in love gradually rather than on the first occasion they meet the other person?
Perhaps if you don't know there's a gap, you don't worry about it. If you were a millipede, a tshongololo, crawling along the ground would you look at the birds and worry about not having wings? Probably not.
She had been seized with a sudden existential horror. The house had white carpets and white furniture and, most significantly, no books.
Men can be teenagers until well into their twenties. That is well known
Well, that's the important thing, isn't it, Mma? To feel happiness, and then to remember it.
Lightning always strikes in the same place twice," said Mma Ramotswe. "Whatever people say to the contrary.
It is my duty to help them solve the mysteries in their lives. That is what I am called to do.
The young rarely believe that they will not be able to get what they want, because there is always an open future.
She had noticed that there was a tendency on the part of some Americans to believe that everybody, deep inside, wanted to live in America, and that it was inexplicable that people who could do so did not.
You say that you lost your child. You know how I feel then. You know that, don't you? It's a sadness that never goes away.
Anthropology, she thought, like charity, surely begins at home.
...it must be odd to have no ambition, not to want something more.
Myth is a cloud based upon a shadow based upon the movement of the breeze.
I'd like to be tidy, said Hen, I try, but I guess you can't be what you aren't.
None of us is immune to shipwreck. Come, beckons the fatal shore: come and die on my white sands, it said. And we do.
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.
Mma Ramotswe did not like lying, but sometimes it was necessary, particularly when faced with people who were promoted beyond their talents.
Moisturiser and a good cry: two things for modern men to think about.
Will you be my friend?” Bertie asked. And then added: “Just for Paris. You don’t have to be my friend forever – just for Paris.
The problem with being me, thought Isabel, as she walked along George IV Bridge, is that I keep thinking about the problem of being me.
Women, as usual, were expected to behave better than men, and inevitably attracted criticism for doing things that men were licensed to do with impunity.
It was time for tea as it so often was.
Antonia was very conscious of the corrosive power of envy and felt that it was this emotion, more than any other, which lay behind human unhappiness. People did not realise how widespread envy was.
There's a difference, I think, between falling in love and knowing it.
How many of us are happy to be exactly where we are at any moment?
