The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine
Alexander McCall Smith
Top 10 Best Quotes
“We must not eat dripping any more,’ warned Mma Makutsi from behind a healthy living magazine. ‘We must give up such things, Mma.’ This advice had been accompanied by a stern look in Mma Ramotswe’s direction. Mma Ramotswe had not taken that lying down. ‘Soon they will be telling us not to eat anything,’ she countered. ‘They will say that only air is good for you. Air and water.’ Mma Makutsi had not approved. ‘You cannot fight science, Mma. Science is telling us that many of the things we like to eat in this country are not good for us. They say that these things are making us too large.’ ‘I am not fighting science, Mma,’ replied Mma Ramotswe. ‘I am just saying that we have to have some things that we like, otherwise we shall be very unhappy. And if you are very unhappy you can die – we all know that.’ She allowed that to sink in before she continued. ‘There are many people who have been thinking a lot about science who are now late. It would have been better for them to spend more time being happy while they had the chance. That is well known, Mma – it is very well known.’ Mma Makutsi had become silent.”
“There is a difference between a challenge and a burden. One is something you can carry on your shoulders easily enough—the other is something, a big sack, that bends you double.”
“The trouble with the world today, she thought, was that people were not prepared to stand up to bad behaviour. They looked away,”
“The size of one’s house might bear a relationship to the size of one’s opinion of oneself, but it had nothing to do with one’s real worth.”
“I worry about you a great deal, Mma. I worry that you will take all the cares of the world on your shoulders and that you will collapse under the weight. I worry that you will open your heart to so many people that eventually it will be full—crowded—and it will stop because there is no room for the blood to go round. I am worried that you will look after so many people that you will forget that there is one person who also needs looking after, and that person is you, Mma. I am worried about all these things.”
“That young man will go far, she said. I don’t know in what direction, but he will go far.”
“I shall go and sit under a tree…. Which tree, Mma?... Oh, there are many trees in this life, she said. It does not matter which tree you choose, as long as you choose the right one.”
“I am just saying that we have to have some things that we like, otherwise we shall be very unhappy. And if you are very unhappy you can die – we all know that.”
“Everything, it seemed to Mma Ramotswe, had a waiting list—except the government taxman and the call, when it came, to leave this world. You could not argue with the agents of either of these: you paid, and you went. But I am just on the waiting list…No, there is no waiting list for these things…”
“Being loved and admired by a man like that—and she knew that this man, this mechanic, this fixer of machines with their broken hearts, did indeed love and admire her—was like walking in the sunshine; it gave the same feeling of warmth and pleasure to bask in the love of one who has promised it, publicly at a wedding ceremony, and who is constant in his promise that such love will be given for the rest of his days. What more could any woman ask? None of us, she thought, not one single one of us, could ask for anything more than that.”
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Book Keywords:
size, houses, self-importance, life, trees, alexander-mccall-smith, direction, sitting
