…did it make a difference if the remark never got back to the person about whom it was made? She thought not. The harm is done when the words are uttered: that is the act of belittlement, the act of d...
He is a good, kind man, said Mma Potokwane. And such men are often too busy. I have noticed that round here too. That man I was talking to just then—one of our groundsmen—he is like that. He is so kin...
And if there's bad behaviour, Mma Potokwane went on. If there's bad behaviour, the quickest way of stopping it is to give more love. That always works, you know. People say we must punish when there i...
You must not think that because one thing happens after another thing, then it is the first thing that causes the second thing. You must not think that, because it might not be true.
To lose your own language was like forgetting your mother, and as sad, in a way.
The winds must come from somewhere when they blow…There must be reasons why the leaves decay.(From Auden's If I Could Tell You
The trouble with this country...is that we are utterly surrounded by busybodies trying to stop us doing things. Or telling us what to do...Big Brother, with his ubiquitous closed-circuit cameras-which...
Self-pity does not appreciate pedantry.
Everybody who consulted her was, in their way, hurting--even this rich man with his big Mercedes-Benz and his expensive cuff-links. Human hurt was like lightning; it did not choose its targets, but st...
Africa was full of people in need of help and there had to be a limit. You simply could not help everybody; but you could at least help those who came into your life. That principle allowed you to dea...
He was sent off to boarding school. Gresham’s School is in a small town called Holt, in Norfolk, a remote part of rural England. Unlike many boarding schools of the day, the regime in this school was...
There is a tidal wave of ignorance, Mma Ramotswe. It is a great tidal wave and it will drown all of us if we are not careful.
Sometimes wickedness prevails.
Neighbours are given to us on the same basis as we are given our families. There is no element of choice involved - none at all.
Men can be teenagers until well into their twenties. That is well known
International business, once allowed to stalk uncontrolled, killed the local, the small, the quirky.
Animals, like people, did not ask to be who or what they were, and to make life difficult for others simply for being what they were seemed to her to be fundamentally unkind.
You have to leave your heart to get on with it. It's rather like breathing. We don't have to remind ourselves to breathe.
Why not imagine a talk with a pumpkin? Why not imagine going off for a drive with a friendly pumpkin, a companion who would not, after all, answer back; who would agree with everything you said, and w...
What we have, we all must lose—that applied to everything, even to that which we thought we had the greatest right. We were tenants of this earth—nothing more.