Love in the Time of Bertie
Alexander McCall Smith
Top 10 Best Quotes
“But Domenica thought: I really would like things to be forever. I would like to be able to sit at this table once a week, perhaps, with these friends. I would like to talk about the things we talk about, the small things, whatever happened in the world. I would like to wake up in the morning and not think that things were getting worse. I would like not to have to listen to the exchange of insults between politicians. I would like to hear of people co-operating with one another and helping others and bringing succour and comfort to the needy and... and I would like not to think that we were still in the seventeenth century, as divided amongst ourselves as they were at that time, pitted against each other, with one vision of the good battling another, and people despising others for their opinions.”
“You can’t condemn the present for the wrongs of the past.”
“There were times when one thought the opposite of what one really felt. That was very common, and this was an example of exactly that.”
“There are roads to Damascus, she told herself. People travel on them.”
“There are plenty of good stories. There are plenty of good people who go through life without … well, without anger. Who are kind to other folk. Who don't rant and rage.”
“The manacles we forge for ourselves might be comfortable ones, may not chafe too much, and yet they are manacles nonetheless – bonds of family, of profession, of debt, of personal obligation. Or they may be woven of the simple and only too familiar lassitude that prevents us from doing anything to disturb the established patterns of our life.”
“That was always the case, she thought: the perfect riposte, the mot juste, inevitably occurred well after the event, and one could not really write to somebody and tell them what you would have said had you thought about it in time.”
“One might forget so many exotic cheeses, he thought, but the memory of cheddar always remained.”
“It was the beauty of the country before them that had done it. Scotland was a place of attenuated light, of fragility, of a beauty that broke the heart.”
“It did not matter in the least what bed you were born in: what counted was what you were inside. People in England, she suspected, sometimes just did not grasp that and that was a pity: their society was more stratified than Scotland's; they needed to read Robert Burns’s A Man’s a Man for a’ That, she felt, because that said all that had to be said on that subject. If you understood what Burns was saying in that poem, then you understood how Scotland felt—at heart.”
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Book Keywords:
scotland, forever, beauty, scottish, utopia, happiness, ideal-world
