Saying sorry does not make you look small—it makes you look big. I think so too, said Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. But some people are small inside, and if you’re small inside, you can’t be big outside. It ju...
Regularity without some metaphysical value behind it, some beauty of soul or character, was more disappointing – and indeed repulsive – than the honestly haphazard, the humanly messy.
Problems have a way of solving themselves.
Plenty of people were writing novels; in fact, if one did a survey in the street, half of Edinburgh was writing a novel, and this meant that there really weren't enough characters to go round. Unless,...
Perhaps there was no real point to our existence–or none that we could discern–and that meant that the real question that had to be asked was this: How can I make my life bearable? We are here whether...
Perhaps one should expect to be attended to by philosophers in Edinburgh delicatessens, just as one might be waited upon by psychoanalysts in the restaurants of Buenos Aires. Is the braised beef reall...
On the wall of this yard there was the wording, painted in high letters: Reliable Autos. We get you there.Get you where? asked Fanwell. Chobie smiled. Where you want to get. That's where everybody's h...
Of course not, said Mma Makutsi. There is nothing to be ashamed of in drinking one hundred cups of tea a week, Mma. Which is … She paused again. More than five thousand cups of tea a year, Mma. That i...
Most problems could be diminished by the drinking of tea and the thinking through of things that could be done while tea was being drunk. And even if that did not solve problems, at least it could put...
Modern sentences are short. In Proust, we encounter sentences which appear interminable, meandering on and on in a way which suggests that the author had no desire to bring a satisfying or intriguing...
Matthew and Elspeth knew the Duke of Johannesburg, of course. Matthew had first met him some years earlier when he had gone to a party at Single-Malt House, the Duke’s seat. Most of us have houses or...
Look at every territorial dispute you care to mention. Northern Ireland, for instance. Religion in that case, Jamie ventured. Not just. Religion was the badge of identity, but it wasn’t really about w...
Let’s go back to the lines at the end of In Praise of Limestone: What I hear is the sound of underground streams / What I see is a limestone landscape. Close your eyes and try to imagine the shape of...
Leave them, said Isabel. Jamie can iron them himself. It’s very therapeutic for men to iron. Therapeutic for women, that is.
It was curious how some people had a highly developed sense of guilt, she thought, while others had none. Some people would agonise over minor slips or mistakes on their part, while others would feel...
It is the onion, memory, that makes me cry, he said.
Isabel saw the intimacy of the gestures and felt immediately empty, a sensation so physical and so overwhelming that she felt for a moment that she might stop breathing, being empty of air
In fact, none of us knows how he ever managed to get his LLB in the first place. Maybe they’re putting law degrees in cornflakes boxes these days.
If you punish somebody harshly, she said, then you are simply inflicting more pain on the world. You are also punishing not only that person, but his family and the people who love him. You are punish...
If you are there to staunch the tears of the world, then it does not cross your mind that you yourself may weep.