Home > Work > The Forgotten Affairs of Youth (Isabel Dalhousie, #8)
21 " A life without moments of unhappiness would be monotonous, I would have thought. "
― Alexander McCall Smith , The Forgotten Affairs of Youth (Isabel Dalhousie, #8)
22 " ..."Charming people, when not actively shooting one another," a friend had once said, which was so unkind, but, like so many unkind comments, had a grain of truth in it. They did shoot one another and had been doing so for centuries. They did bicker over and brood on long-dead history--or history that should be long dead. The problem with history was that it refused to lie down and die. "
23 " 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 we do, but in what we later say about what we have done.... "
24 " ...She was, in fact, often wrong--and knew it. Life became difficult when those who were often wrong did not know it. "
25 " Mushroom people are fond of saying, ‘There are old mycologists and there are bold mycologists, but there are no old, bold mycologists.’ "
26 " Political scandals, economic disaster, suffering in all its familiar forms—these were the daily staple of a disaster-prone, uneasy planet. "
27 " Metaphors were so bloody: people shot messengers, flogged dead horses, cut the throats of their competitors. Perhaps that was life; perhaps that was what it was really like. "