Yes. Look at the way in which a little boy plays. He prods. He investigates things all around him. He moves them. He tries to push them over. Then look at girls. They touch things gently. They watch t...
Yes, she agreed, there are times when I am unhappy and times when I am happy. There are more happy times than unhappy ones, I think.
Yes, wisdom: that was something that came to everybody, although it came in varying quantities and at different times.
Yes, thought Mma Ramotswe, the world can be very discouraging. But we cannot sit and think about all the things that have gone wrong, or could go wrong. There was no point in doing that...There was mu...
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 Simplicity and sincerity have been replaced by obsfucation and pretense.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...
Why should everybody embrace the herd instinct, which required one to regard one set of politicians as being always in the right while demonizing another set?
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...
Which is how most people acted when it came to temptation. They gave in. And we should never forget, thought Isabel, that every one of us is capable of doing the same thing if the game that we see for...
When you are with somebody you love the smallest, smallest things can be so important, so amusing because love transforms the world, everything. And was that what had happened?
When there is nothing you can do to stop the march of adverse events, then the best thing, she felt, was to get on with life and not to worry.
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 were tiny creatures, really; tiny and afraid, trying to hold our place on the little platform that was our earth. So while the world about us might seem so solid, so permanent, it was not really. W...
We need a person whom we can make our little god on this earth, as the old Kgatla saying had it. Whether it was a spouse, or a child, or a parent, or anybody else for that matter, there must be somebo...
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 don't forget...Our heads may be small, but they are as full of memories as the sky may sometimes be full of swarming bees, thousands and thousands of memories, smells of places, of little things th...
We do not want people thinking that we’re trying to start a dynasty, he explained. You know how you get those politicians who are sons of other politicians and grandsons of even more politicians. I do...
Truth had a way of coming out on top—and it was just as well for everybody that it did. If there ever came a day when truth was so soundly defeated that it never emerged, but sank, instead, under the...
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...