William closed his eyes in sheer ecstasy. Look, I know it’s absolutely no notice at all, but would you by any chance be free for dinner tonight? he asked. Again there was a silence. And then, once aga...
Why? Why is there a crisis in literature? Because of lies and rottenness. Simplicity and sincerity have been replaced by obsfucation and pretense. Men, of course. They love to create mystery where non...
Whisky nosers, as they called themselves, eschewed what they saw as the pretentiousness of wine vocabulary. While oenophiles resorted to recondite adjectives, whisky nosers spoke the language of every...
What a strange,old-fashioned thing to think. Bless you. But what other way was there of saying that you wanted only good for somebody, that you wanted the world to be kind to her, to cherish her?Only...
We’ve all had that sort of experience, said Mma Ramotswe. Every one of us, Mma. We’ve all had a first day at school, or a first day in a new job. We’ve all been unsure what to do.
Well, said Mma Ramotswe, I have felt that anger. I felt it when I saw that the van had gone. I felt it a bit in the truck on the way back. But what is the point of anger now, Mma? I don’t think that a...
We should not be too surprised by the kindness of strangers, as it is always there.
We might more of us say these words to others, and more frequently--how healing that would prove to be. Look, we've had our differences, but how about some chocolate? Or: I'm so sorry: how about some...
We do not like those who are completely available, who make themselves over to us entirely. They crowd us out. They make us feel uneasy.
We change the earth and our changes may only be temporary; yet the signs of what we have done may persist, as these mounds did.
We become the people we live with. Imperceptibly at first, but with a certain inevitability, we become the other.
We assume so much, don’t we? We assume that our children are going to be reasonable. We assume they’re going to see things as we see them. And then suddenly we discover that they can look at things qu...
We are all sent the dreams we yearn for, she thought; no matter how unhappy or fraught our waking world may be, we are sent dreams in which we can do the things the heart really wants us to do.
To dispatch one's friends to a dictionary from time to time is one of the more sophisticated pleasures of life, but it is one that must be indulged in sparingly: to do it too often may result in accus...
To be cut down to size is good for all of us, but particularly so for those who forget how transient are our cultures and institutions, how pointless and cruel our divisions, how vain our claims to sp...
Time, she felt, made quite enough claims on us, without our conniving in its relentless tyranny.
Those regularly-featured Hollywood males made her feel slightly nauseous; and the same could be said for their female equivalents, hardly intellectuals they. These people had regular features but were...
This was loyalty of a sort which was rare in an age of self-indulgence. It was an old-fashioned virtue of the type which her philosophical colleagues extolled but could never themselves match.
They realized that belief of whatever sort-whether it was the faith in History and the State, as in the shattered halls of communism, or faith in a particular theology-at least made it possible to get...
They passed the rest of the journey in silence, not because of any awkwardness, but because neither wished conversation to break the spell that the unfolding Highland landscape was weaving about them....