If efficiency were the only value in this life, then we would be content to eat bland but nutritious food every day--and the same food at that. That would keep us alive, but it would make for very dul...
I think this bandage is not needed, said Mma Ramotswe, bending down to remove it. Hospitals feel they have to put a bandage on anybody who goes there—just in case. Sometimes you get a bandage even if...
I think it is time that I put the kettle on,
I have the luxury, I suppose, of being self-employed. But I know what it’s like to apply for jobs.
I am grateful to you for being who you are: for standing up for ladies with large glasses and a bad skin and for everybody else who has had to battle to get where they have got. And most of all I am g...
I am blessed and being blessed is something more than just having something. It is a state of mind in which the good of the world is illuminated, it's understood. It is as if one is vouchsafed a visio...
How many of us are happy to be exactly where we are at any moment?
His particular insight was that we need to be at home; all his concerns with division within ourselves, with the tragic flaws in our nature, with the thwarting of love—all these point to the need that...
Her friend who treated her maid badly was not a wicked person. She behaved well towards her family and she had always been kind to Mma Ramotswe, but when it came to her maid—and Mma Ramotswe had met t...
Her engagement? That is a long story. He laughed,
He was one of those people, she thought, who just seemed to know a great deal. And he spoke so wisely, as if had thought for hours about everything he said.
He took to wearing a Greek merchant navy captain’s cap, and spending his mornings at the marina telling the staff what to do. Sure thing, Captain Eddie, they replied. But they never did what he asked...
He took a deep breath. ‘To marry me,’ he said quietly. It was easier than he thought. Icarus did not fall from the sky; the ground did not open; the earth did not wobble on its trajectory.
He shows the most amazing brass neck, she said.
He seemed genuinely astonished. You admire me?Yes, she said gravely. All of us do things we regret--that's part of being human. And sometimes, I think, moral quality reveals itself not so much in what...
He said: What is patriotism but love of the food one ate as a child?
He represents innocence, and innocence has taken such a profound battering in our times. We have mocked it. We have sullied it. We have put it in intensive care, and frankly, I don’t see how it can su...
He looked up from his stew. Mma Ramotswe, he said, you can do anything. Nothing is too hard for a person like you—nothing. You are very good at doing everything, Mma, and anything you do, Mma
He looked at her in the darkness, at this woman who was everything to him-mother, Africa, wisdom, understanding, good things to eat, pumpkins, chicken, the white sky across the endless, endless bush,...
He had very few criticisms to make of Precious Ramotswe, his wife and founder of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, but if one were to make a list of her faults—which would be a minuscule document, b...