Words that are full of hurt sometimes need to be left in the air where they have been spoken.
Why do you ask that dog if he has a soul? Mma Ramotswe sighed. It’s very complicated, Rra. You see…Well, you see: Mma Makutsi said dogs were just meat inside. Those were her actual words. She’s wrong,...
When she had lived in Bobonong the houses seemed perfectly normal to her and the house in which her family lived had seemed quite comfortable. But looking at it with eyes that had seen Gaborone, and t...
When Emma was five, Mrs. Woodhouse died. Emma did not remember her mother. She remembered love, though, and a feeling of warmth. It was like remembering light, or the glow that sometimes persists afte...
What is beauty, she thought, but the promise of happiness, as Stendhal said it was?
We should all busy ourselves in being who we are, although many of us do not and spend so much time and energy being something else. We try to be what others want us to be, or what we ourselves want t...
We never realise how transparent we are.
We do not talk about wise men or wise ladies any more, she reflected; their place had been taken, it seemed, by all sorts of shallow people—actors and the like—who were only too ready to pronounce on...
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.
Traditional Botswana men like ladies who are more traditionally shaped. You and I, Mma. We remind men of how things used to be in Botswana before these modern-shaped ladies started to get men all conf...
The world, Mma Ramotswe believed, was composed of big things and small things. The big things were written large, and one could not but be aware of them—wars, oppression, the familiar theft by the ric...
The world was an imperfect place--as the events of the last few days had demonstrated--but within that vale of tears there were many sites and times of quietude and contentment, and this place and thi...
That's the way things are, don't you think? It's human nature. We do things for people we know. Everybody does that.
So plans were useful only in revealing what people wished for. If you wanted to know what they would actually do, then the only way of finding out was by watching them and seeing what they did. Then y...
She shook her head. What was the point of anger? There were occasions when Mma Ramotswe, like all of us, could feel angry, but they were few - and they never lasted long. Anger, Obed Ramotswe had expl...
She really is a huge fan. Ulf closed his eyes. He saw the professor being pursued by a group of his fans, the huge ones struggling to keep up with the thinner, more lithe fans, dropping exhausted and...
She had lost her baby, and where was she? She hoped that her baby was happy and would be waiting for her when she left Botswana and went to heaven. Would Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni get round to naming a wedd...
She had always believed that people who were nasty or unkind to others were only like that because there was something wrong in their lives, and that people who had something wrong in their lives were...
She assigned the shirt a number and turned to the next prize. This was a set of six fish knives and forks, made by Hamilton and Inches, and a very handsome prize for somebody. This would be popular at...
Professor Dr Moritz-Maria Von Igelfeld often reflected on how fortunate he was to be exactly who he was, and nobody else. When one paused to think who one might have been had the accident of birth not...