The Full Cupboard of Life
Alexander McCall Smith
Top 10 Best Quotes
“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.”
“We find what we are looking for in life, her father had once said to her, which was true—if you look for happiness, you will see it; if you look for distrust and envy and hatred—all those things—you will find those too.”
“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 difficulty, of course, with standing up to women was that it appeared to make little difference. At the end of the day,a man was no match for a woman.... The only thing to do was to try to avoid situations where women might corner you. And that was difficult, because women had a way of ensuring that you were neatly boxed in, which was exactly what had happened to him. He should have been more careful. He should have been on his guard when she offered him cake. That was her technique, he now understood; just as Eve had used an apple to trap Adam, so [she] had used fruit cake. Fruit cake, apples; it made no difference really. Oh foolish, weak men!”
“Everybody in a village had a role to play in bringing up a child—and cherishing it—and in return that child would in due course feel responsible for everybody in that village. That is what makes life in society possible. We must love one another and help one another in our daily lives. That was the traditional African way and there was no substitute for it. None.”
“If she was going to remain an engaged lady, then she would make the most of it, and one of the ways to do this would be to enjoy her free time.”
“Boys and men are the same people, in different clothes. Boys wear short trousers and men wear long trousers. But they are just the same if you take their trousers off.”
“You were looking for somebody, and there was somebody, and you would convince yourself that this random person was what you were really looking for in the first place.”
“We do not talk about wise men or wise ladies any more, she reflected; their place had been taken, it seemed, by all sorts of shallow people—actors and the like—who were only too ready to pronounce on all sorts of subjects.”
“She had never been able to tolerate dishonesty, which she thought threatened the very heart of relationships between people. If you could not count on other people to mean what they said, or to do what they said they would do, then life could become utterly unpredictable. The fact that we could trust one another made it possible to undertake the simple tasks of life.”
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Book Keywords:
dishonesty, it-takes-a-village, self-fulfillment, love, african, relationships, raising-children, wisdom, tradition, humor, trust, marriage
