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Simple questions--and simple answers--were what we needed in life. That was what Mma Ramotswe believed. Yes.

Alexander McCall Smith

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Alexander McCall Smith
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: August 24
Novelist
Teacher
Writer
Alexander Sandy McCall Smith
Simple
Life
Mma
Believed
Questions
Needed
Answers

More quotes by 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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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?
Alexander McCall Smith
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The Culture of Complaint... We live in a culture of complaint because everyone is always looking for things to complain about. It's all tied in with the desire to blame others for misfortunes and to get some form of compensation into the bargain.
Alexander McCall Smith
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The people with the strong, brave exteriors are just as weak and vulnerable as the rest of us. And of course they never admit to their childish practices, their moments of weakness or absurdity, and then the rest of us think that's how it should be.
Alexander McCall Smith
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I think that we've made great moral progress in the second half of the 20th century in many respects, and particularly in relation to human rights but I think that we are losing sight of some of the values of concern for others, and self-respect and respect for others.
Alexander McCall Smith
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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
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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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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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The point about love, the essential point, was that we loved what we loved. We did not choose. We just loved.
Alexander McCall Smith
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[Edinburgh] is a city of shifting light, of changing skies, of sudden vistas. A city so beautiful it breaks the heart again and again.
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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Old friends, like old shoes, are comfortable. But old shoes, unlike old friends, tend not to be supportive: it is easier to stumble and sprain an ankle while wearing a pair of old shoes than it is in new shoes, with their less yielding leather.
Alexander McCall Smith
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Lou knew that joy unshared was a halved emotion, just as sadness and loss, when borne alone, were often doubled.
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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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.
Alexander McCall Smith
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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
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If you want to write, do two things - read lots of books and also, in your own writing, practise. Just write and write and then write again. persist. And never be put off or discouraged. You can do it!
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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I enjoy women's conversation, and I think that helps me to describe them in fiction.
Alexander McCall Smith
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It's through the small things that we develop our moral imagination, so that we can understand the sufferings of others.
Alexander McCall Smith