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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.

Alexander McCall Smith

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Alexander McCall Smith
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: August 24
Novelist
Teacher
Writer
Alexander Sandy McCall Smith
Tiny
Touch
Everybody
Call
Place
Earth
Persons
Person
Africa

More quotes by Alexander McCall Smith

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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
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Any author of fiction will tell you that characters don't need to be told what to do.
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 am easily persuaded to continue to have fun.
Alexander McCall Smith
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It is the search for beauty...That is what it is. We find ourselves on this earth--gods and men--and we know that it is beautiful. That is one of the few things we understand--beauty because it is there, in the world, and we can see it all about us. We want beauty. It requires our love. It just does.
Alexander McCall Smith
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If you lose sight of the smaller accomplishments , you end up with an imbalance in your life.
Alexander McCall Smith
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Daughters could survive a powerful mother, but boys found it almost impossible. Such boys were often severely damaged and spent the rest of their lives running away from their mothers, or from anybody who remotely reminded them of their mothers either that, or they became their mothers, in a desperate, misguided act of psychological self defence.
Alexander McCall Smith
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But don't we often lie to people we love, or not tell them things, precisely because we love them?
Alexander McCall Smith
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International business, once allowed to stalk uncontrolled, killed the local, the small, the quirky.
Alexander McCall Smith
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I have three older sisters, so we were a reasonably large family and, in general, a happy one.
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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Everything has been something before.
Alexander McCall Smith
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If your ceiling should fall down, then you have lost a room, but gained a courtyard. Think of it that way.
Alexander McCall Smith
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Do not take on a traditionally built person unless you are prepared for a heavyweight bout.
Alexander McCall Smith
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We think the world is ours forever, but we are little more than squatters.
Alexander McCall Smith
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It was time to take the pumpkin out of the pot and eat it. In the final analysis, that was what solved these big problems of life. You could think and think and get nowhere, but you still had to eat your pumpkin. That brought you down to earth. That gave you a reason for going on. Pumpkin.
Alexander McCall Smith
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As a writer, you have to realize that people want to like the characters, so you have to be careful to keep them involved.
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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We are all tempted, Mma. We are all tempted when it comes to cake.
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