Everything has been something before.

A major difficulty with our theoretical understanding of dating is that we simply do not appreciate the purpose of the entire encounter. If we see it for what it really is--a courtship ritual--then we can identify the deep structures of the ritual, and that enables us to detect what is really going on. So dating is really all about sex.

We don't forget.... Our heads may be small, but they are as full of memories as the sky may sometimes be full of swarming bees, thousands and thousands of memories, of smells, of places, of little things that happened to us and which came back, unexpectedly, to remind us who we are.

Most people want nothing to happen. That is the problem with governments these days. They want to do things all the time; they are always very busy thinking of what things they can do next. That is not what people want. People want to be left alone to look after their cattle.

To lose a child ... was something that could end one's world. One could never get back to how it was before. The stars went out. The moon disappeared. The birds became silent.

At night we are all strangers, even to ourselves.

A wedding was a strange ceremony, she thought, with all those formal words, those solemn vows made by one to another; whereas the real question that should be put to the two people involved was a very simple one. Are you happy with each other? was the only question that should be asked; to which they both should reply, preferably in unison, Yes.

ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH, The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party

She was made for untidy rooms and rumpled beds.

ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH, The Sunday Philosophy Club

We needed resentment ... as it was resentment which identified and underlined the wrong. Without these reactive attitudes, we ran the risk of diminishing our sense of right and wrong, because we could end up thinking it just doesn't matter.

ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH, The Sunday Philosophy Club

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 ones in which we are bound to one another with hoops of steel.