I have a feeling that we’ve seen the dismantling of civilisation, brick by brick, and now we’re looking into the void. We thought that we were liberating people from oppressive cultural circumstances, but we were,...

In an earlier age, it might have been possible to believe that goodness would prevail over pride, but not anymore. The proud could be proud with impunity, because there was nobody to contradict him in...

That, incidentally, gives me the greatest possible pleasure—the knowledge that we are all linked by our friendship with a group of fictional people. What a pleasant club of which to be a member! [from the...

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...

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.

She was made for untidy rooms and rumpled beds.

It’s because there are too many people who want to stop us having fun. That’s the reason.

There were some people, it seemed, who were incapable of being pleasant about anything. Of course, the cars that such people drove tended to be difficult as well. Nice cars have nice drivers; bad cars...

The language of Cat’s generation was far harder than that of her own, and more pithily correct: in their terms, he was a hunk. But why, she wondered, should anybody actually want a hunk, when...

I said to him that Zululand sounded fine, but that every man has a map in his heart of his own country and that the heart will never allow you to forget this map.

It’s really rather easy to write eighth-century Chinese poetry,” said Angus Lordie. “In English, of course. It requires little effort, I find.

Great feuds often need very few words to resolve them. Disputes, even between nations, between peoples, can be set to rest with simple acts of contrition and corresponding forgiveness, can so often be shown to...

Myth is a cloud based upon a shadow based upon the movement of the breeze.

She did not think that those who were late, or the ancestors themselves, would wish punishment upon us, no matter what our transgressions. It was far more likely that there would be love, falling like...

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...

…the real poison within families is not the poison that you put in your food, but the poison that grows up in the heart when people are jealous of one another and cannot speak these...

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,...

Men are very sensitive, Mma Makutsi. You would not always think it to look at them, but they are. They do not like you to point out that they are wrong, even when they are....

Out in Saxe-Coburg Street she stood still for a moment and looked at the gardens. He kissed me, she thought. He made the move; I didn’t. The thought was an overwhelming one and invested the...

Moral beauty existed as clearly as any other form of beauty and perhaps that was where we could find the God who was so vividly, and sometimes bizarrely, described in our noisy religious explanations. It...

She would not allow herself to remember how Note had treated her, and many others too, she suspected. She had forgiven him, yes, but she still did not like to remember. And perhaps a deliberate...

So the small things came into their own: small acts of helping others, if one could; small ways of making one’s own life better: acts of love, acts of tea, acts of laughter. Clever people...

Neighbours are given to us on the same basis as we are given our families. There is no element of choice involved – none at all.

She brought a chair into the room and placed it alongside the top of his bed. Then she held his hand as he drifted off to sleep. It was so small in her own hand,...

It is hard, she thought, it is hard for us to think of people who dislike us because none of us, in our heart, believes that we deserve the hatred of others.

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.

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.

His sixth year, it seemed to him, had lasted a remarkably long time and there were points at which he frankly wondered whether he would ever turn seven. But now it was the night before...

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...

A moral dilemma is equally absorbing whether the stakes are the destiny of nations or the happiness of one or two people – at the most.

There was a teapot, in which Mma Ramotswe — the only lady private detective in Botwana — brewed tea. And three mugs — one for herself, one for her secretary, and one for the client....

Myth could be as sustaining as reality – sometimes even more so.

The house seemed so different at night. Everything was in its correct place, of course, but somehow the furniture seemed more angular and the pictures on the wall more one-dimensional. She remembered somebody saying that...

…it must be odd to have no ambition, not to want something more.

There was a distinction between lying and telling half-truths, but it was a very narrow one.

He will be a small man inside,” said Mma Ramotswe. “He will feel small and unimportant. That is why he needs to put ladies down, Mma. Men who are big inside never feel the need...

Everything, all those great things, had happened so far away–or so it seemed to [Mma Ramotswe] at the time. The world was made to sound as if it belonged to other people–to those who lived...

The forges of friendship, thought Angus, may be busy ones, but their dorrs are always open.

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.

Now the tea began to do its work- as it always did- and the world that only a few minutes previously had seemed so bleak started to seem less so.

we must love those with whom we live and work, and love them for all their failings, manifest and manifold though they be.

Memories of that which we have lost are curious things – weeks, months, even years may pass without recollection of them and then, quite suddenly, something will remind us of a lost friend, or of...

She was of traditional build herself, but her figure was largely concealed by the folds of a generously cut shift dress made out of a flecked green fabric. It was like a tent, thought Mma...

She had argued for a broad interpretation, which imposed a duty to answer questions truthfully, and not to hide facts which could give a different complexion to a matter, but on subsequent thought she had...

Men can be teenagers until well into their twenties. That is well known

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.

Now constipation was quite a different matter…It would be dreadful for the whole world to know about troubles of that nature. She felt terribly sorry for people who suffered from constipation, and she knew that...

The problem, of course, was that people did not seem to understand the difference between right and wrong. They needed to be reminded about this, because if you left it to them to work out...

Just for Paris. You don’t have to be my friend forever – just for Paris.

Mma Ramotswe decided to go back into her office. There was a curious thing about male conversation that she had noticed – men often ended up poking fun at one another. Women did this only...