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Edinburgh used to be a haughty city.

Alexander McCall Smith

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Alexander McCall Smith
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: August 24
Novelist
Teacher
Writer
Alexander Sandy McCall Smith
Edinburgh
Haughty
City
Cities
Used

More quotes by Alexander McCall Smith

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One of the most destructive things that's happening in modern society is that we are losing our sense of the bonds that bind people together - which can lead to nightmares of social collapse.
Alexander McCall Smith
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You can go through life and make new friends every year - every month practically - but there was never any substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive into adult years. Those are the ones in which we are bound to one another with hoops of steel.
Alexander McCall Smith
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I would certainly never consider myself a Renaissance Man I'm not fit to look at the dust from the chariot wheels of many of those who have gone before me.
Alexander McCall Smith
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I am capable of being idle.
Alexander McCall Smith
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Everything has been something before.
Alexander McCall Smith
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There are old mycologists and there are bold mycologists, but there are no old, bold mycologists.
Alexander McCall Smith
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A wedding was a strange ceremony, she thought, with all those formal words, those solemn vows made by one to another whereas the real question that should be put to the two people involved was a very simple one. Are you happy with each other? was the only question that should be asked to which they both should reply, preferably in unison, Yes.
Alexander McCall Smith
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When you allow people to do what they wish, then that is what they do. They stop doing the things they need to do.
Alexander McCall Smith
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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.
Alexander McCall Smith
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Most people want nothing to happen. That is the problem with governments these days. They want to do things all the time they are always very busy thinking of what things they can do next. That is not what people want. People want to be left alone to look after their cattle.
Alexander McCall Smith
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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
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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.
Alexander McCall Smith
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To lose a child ... was something that could end one's world. One could never get back to how it was before. The stars went out. The moon disappeared. The birds became silent.
Alexander McCall Smith
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Talking about pumpkins doesn't make them grow.
Alexander McCall Smith
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Well, Id say all of us are a combination of moods and emotions. In my day to day life I dont go around skipping, but at times one can feel sheer exhilarating joy at the world.
Alexander McCall Smith
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But we make such mistakes all the time, all through our lives. Wisdom, I suppose, is seeing this and acting upon it before it is too late. But it is often too late, isn't it? - and those things that we should have said are unsaid, and remain unsaid for ever.
Alexander McCall Smith
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We are all tempted, Mma. We are all tempted when it comes to cake.
Alexander McCall Smith
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We don't forget.... Our heads may be small, but they are as full of memories as the sky may sometimes be full of swarming bees, thousands and thousands of memories, of smells, of places, of little things that happened to us and which came back, unexpectedly, to remind us who we are.
Alexander McCall Smith
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I am often thanked by people for inventing the term traditionally built. The people who give me thanks for this are often traditionally built themselves.
Alexander McCall Smith
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It is not enough just to identify a problem there are plenty of people who were very skilled at pointing out what was wrong with the world, but they were not always so adept at working out how these things could be righted.
Alexander McCall Smith