1
" She would not allow herself to remember how Note had treated her, and many others too, she suspected. She had forgiven him, yes, but she still did not like to remember. And perhaps a deliberate act of forgetting went along with forgiveness. You forgave, and then you said to yourself: Now I shall forget. Because if you did not forget, then your forgiveness would be tested, perhaps many times and in ways that you could not resist, and you might go back to anger, and to hating. "
― Alexander McCall Smith , The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon (No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency #14)
7
" Blocks of flats could change everything, thought Mma Ramotswe. They were designed for people, but people were not necessarily designed for them. These flats at the edges of the Village, though, were made more human by the washing that was hung out to dry from their balconies; by the children who congregated in their doorways, or played with skipping ropes and dogs on their pathways; by the music that the residents listened to, melodies that drifted out of the open windows and throbbed with life. All of this made it harder for large new buildings to deaden the human spirit. It was like the bush: you could clear it and build something where once there had been nothing but trees and grass and termite mounds, but if you turned your back for a moment, Africa would begin to reclaim what had always been hers. The grass would encroach, its seeds carried by the wind; birds would drop the seeds of saplings that would then send tiny shoots up out of the ground; the termites would marshal their exploratory troops to begin rebuilding their own intricate cities of mud in the very places they had claimed once before. And sooner or later the bush would have covered all your efforts and it would be as it was before, the wound on nature completely healed. "
― Alexander McCall Smith , The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon (No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency #14)
