Mr. J.L.B Matekoni, she asked, do you think that our souls grow as we get older?He did not answer immediately, but when he did, she thought his answer quite perfect. Yes, he said. Our souls get wider....
I’ve never played,' said von Igelfeld.
It was hard to disappear completely in Botswana, where there were fewer than two million people and where people had a healthy curiosity as to who was who and where people had come from. It was very d...
It was another of Mma Makutsi's odd statements—utterly unfounded in fact, Mma Ramotswe suspected, but not a point that she wished to argue. As far as she was concerned, if a chair was empty, then anyb...
It was always a mistake, she thought, to dwell on the cause of one's anger.
If we let the men talk about them and decide them, then suddenly we wake up and find out that the men have made all the decisions, and these decisions all suit men.
He was a man of the very broadest outlook, but he never believed in going anywhere. He had a very sensitive stomach, you know, and that is always a disincentive to travel. If you have a sensitive stom...
Eddie let out a whistle. You really got rid of that old bag. Please don’t call her that. But that’s what she is, said Eddie. She complained to me about the Parmesan the other day. She more or less acc...
Dr. Svensson had once counselled him to think of the things you’re doing rather than the things you did.
Dislike required energy and a good memory for slights; geniality was so much less demanding, and at the end of the day felt better too.
Chance; pure chance. But chance was a dull explanation because it denied the possibility of the paranormal, and people were often disappointed by dull explanations. Mystery and the unknown were far mo...
But sometimes cats just have nasty natures, don’t you think? And you can’t do much about a personality disorder. Cats are psychopaths at heart.
Anybody in any employment in Botswana was expected to engage somebody to help in the house. There was nothing extravagant about this; it was, in fact, a form of sharing: if you had a job, you had mone...
And yet,’ he went on, ‘who talks about forgiveness these days, other than the people who come to this place, or to places like this? What politician, what public person, do we hear standing up and say...
And the difference was this, she mused: those who are twenty don’t know what it is like to be forty, whereas those who are forty know what it is like to be twenty. It was a bit like discussing a forei...
And God was here anyway, before the missionaries came. We called him by a different name, then, and he did not live over at the Jews’ place; he lived here in Africa, in the rocks, in the sky, in place...
Although she was unenthusiastic about theology, she had long since realised that the real point of prayer was not to flatter those addressed; prayer was a form of meditation, she decided, and it did n...
All cats are grey in the dark, he had written in one chapter. So remember that how much you can see of a situation depends on how much light you can shine upon it.
Alain de Botton has written a book called How Proust Can Change Your Life, a title that I suspect was devised with at least some tongue in cheek but that speaks, nonetheless, to a very real possibilit...
Africa had a way of coming back and simply covering everything up again.