A Distant View of Everything
Alexander McCall Smith
Top 10 Best Quotes
“What I said to you was private. We can have private reservations about a person’s work, but that doesn’t mean to say that we have to spell those out to him. It’s called tact, Isabel!”
“We become the people we live with. Imperceptibly at first, but with a certain inevitability, we become the other.”
“We assume so much, don’t we? We assume that our children are going to be reasonable. We assume they’re going to see things as we see them. And then suddenly we discover that they can look at things quite differently.”
“Waiting in the reception area, she had flicked through a news magazine that had been lying on the table for clients to read while waiting for their appointment. On the cover there had been a picture of a well-known politician, a man famous for his rudeness and aggression. She had looked at the eyes--the piercing, accusing eyes, and had seen only an impenetrable, defensive anger. Nothing--no forced smiles nor rehearsed protestation of concern, could cancel out the cold selfishness of those eyes.”
“There’s a poem about onions,” she said. “It’s about how memory is like an onion—it makes you cry.”
“The trouble with having a conscience, she said to herself, is that it never sleeps.”
“The eyes are the window of the soul…it was such a well-worn adage, a cliché by now, but Isabel had read that neuroscience, which was validating so many intuitive, ancient beliefs about who we were and how we lived our lives, now confirmed this insight too. The part of the brain that was most closely associated with self-awareness, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, lay directly behind the eyes. So that was where we were located—that was where the soul was to be found, if it were to be found anywhere.”
“She was thinking of Mobile, where her mother—her “sainted American mother,” as she called her—had spent her childhood. That was a place of shady streets; of moss that hung from the boughs of trees, as if draped there for adornment by some enthusiastic exterior decorator; of sultry, velvet evenings. Things moved slowly in Mobile, as they did, traditionally, throughout the South. And why should they not? If you walked quickly, then all you did was to reach your destination early; nothing had been gained. And if you spoke quickly, you got more words out, but were those words any better for that?”
“She said that too.” His voice was low key and modest. The accent, which was not very pronounced, had the gentle burr of the Scottish professional classes. This was an accent that would score highly in those tests of reliability that newspapers liked to carry out—those surveys that tended to reveal that a mild Scottish accent in a bank manager or financial adviser inspired more public trust than any other voice. By the same token, although the surveys were never so tactless as to point it out, people were reluctant to take investment recommendations from a person with a very strong Irish accent. There was no objective reason for this, of course, even if Ireland had created a property bubble of gargantuan proportions in the days of easily borrowed money. These views were tied in with old perceptions, and were slow to change, even in the face of hard evidence.”
“Preserve’ is an entirely suitable motto for a jam-making company,” said one. “Marmalade and so on—I’m not so sure it’s quite right for a firm of lawyers.”
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Book Keywords:
personality, politicians, eyes, anger
